Final Exam

Overall, the best aspect of this course was that it increased many times my confidence in these new areas. I'm sure I will still pester Amy, Brandon, and Tami on a regular basis, but now I feel better able to explore many topics on my own, and I see the value and the mechanisms in making this so.

I found the big, basic elements like Google Reader, wikis, blogging, Delicious, and such the most inspiring and useful right off the bat. Many of the tools that I began to examine excitedly turned out to be less so, but many I will keep in mind. Task 8, exploring Delicious, was actually the most difficult to do, for with the Google Chrome bookmarklets, it was much more cumbersome than usual to work with it. I am now exploring some extensions and patches for Google Chrome. I wouldn't, though, change much of anything about the course. The diversity of topics and approaches fosters a richer way to think about the opportunities and challenges presented by the new and developing aspects of the web. Some lessons were more engaging than others or have proven to have more legs in the classroom, but everything was stimulating and exposed me to ideas I'd never considered before.

I'm using Google Reader every day and continue to tweak it. I have several ideas for wikis related to my work with China, Egypt, and game. Becca and I will definitely continue to develop wiki work with the kids, and we have some new ideas for the class web page, especially including many more links. When I have more time, I do want to catalog our classroom books with LibraryThing.

Then I ran across Muppets Meet the Internet. Beaker is awesome!

I appreciate the time and effort that's gone in to this training. Thanks, everyone!

Task 12 - Share What You Have Learned

I sent out an email to all of the elementary school teachers and received loads of response in return.

1. I discussed a class wiki with Becca. We've each done some work with a class wiki, but I'm thinking about migrating some of the material from our web site to a wiki. Some pages would be locked and only altered by me or her, and others would be open for students and parents to play. We both seem to like this idea, so now we need to set it up to play with this year and then implement more fully next school year.

2. I also met with Ken Sosebee. I started to show Google Reader to Ken, but his computer was blocked from gmail, so then we looked at Delicious. I actually found a site (http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/20_chrome_tweaks) about Google Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome/?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-bk-gen&utm_medium=ha) that interested me. He liked looking at other people's lists and all of the compilations, but he wasn't ready to upload his own bookmarks. I sent him a link (http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/) and the passcode for looking at the media on Discovery Education. When we have more time, I'd also like to discuss with Ken creating a wiki, wherein his students and mine could create posts and material about the subjects he and I share, Egypt and China.

Task 11 - Use Your Tools

I wanted to experiment more with wikis and kids, so I set up a class wiki site with the open-ended statement, "China is...". As an example and to set the tone for their work, I put in a picture of myself with some fourth graders in Bangxie village from my summer travels, and then I added a paragraph describing impressions of China from the experience and a link to a web site about Yunnan province with a map. The following week, I gave the kids the following assignment.

CHINA IS: Go to the Wikispaces site (davidandbeccasclass.wikispaces.com). Login using your personal password. Add something to the wiki.

• It can be a full paragraph that you write yourself.

• It can be a link, file, image, or widget. You need to add at least three sentences about why you chose it.

• You must put your name and the date above your addition.

I had created user names and passwords for each student. We had a dedicated class period for explaining the assignment and to demonstrate on the ActivBoard how to add material to the wiki. One student, having read our class work list over the weekend, had her assignment ready, so we added that and then modified a few things as examples. Giving clear directions proved more complex than it seemed, so I was glad Becca and I were both familiar with Wikispaces and wikis. The kids were excited. I gave them their individual passwords on slips of paper and admonished them that they needed to keep them secure. I acknowledged that I could track changes and which login had made them. If it looked like a particular kid, then it was their responsibility, even if someone else, also in the dog house, had used their login. They took it to heart. In addition to normal kid procrastination, we had issues with people editing at the same time, which led to one significant erasure by one student of the work of five others. Everyone took it in stride, and I gave the five an extension to go back and add their ideas again. The perp was very careful from then on, even calling me the next week to check before he saved anything new. Lessons learned by us all.

The next week, in fact, they went back and commented on one another's additions within the wiki page. They knew better what they were doing the second time around. It was tricky to check to be sure all thirty kids had posted a substantive comment and then to see if each of them had made five substantial comments about others' original comments. Actually, it's probably not trickier than checking kids' work in the past, but I have to go through their work differently.

I think I'd start with an even simpler wiki project next time, but the kids and I really got our feet wet, learned some skills, and created something substantial.

Task 10 - Cool Tools II

More cool tools! There is so much fun stuff in the internet, though it's not always as handy or applicable as what I already have to work with. Still, exploring is awesome!

Glifty is cool looking mapping software at first but only 30 days free and only good for mapping offices and homes. Mindomo also looks cool, but Inspiration is plenty enough for what we need in the classroom and is at about the limit of what we can teach our kids.

I next visited Jigzone. I tried cute kitten first. I added it to my Sand Castle, though it wasn't working on the website for me. Still, it's cute!

Letterpop is cool for creating newsletter type things, but I think Word does almost all of that, and Letterpop only allows limited usage with the free account.

Mixbook sounds interesting, though more to post online than to publish physically. I like the idea that I can add collaborators like parents and students, perhaps to compile photos from Camp Greenville or a China trip. Of course, months or more will intervene. Will the software still be out there?

Timeglider is sooooo slow. It could be cool, but the software like it that I've used on my own computer is much faster.

Sketchcast is a cool way to capture the process of drawing, and I'd be happy to lead an interested kid to it, but it's not for me.

On Weebly I created a new drag-and-drop website, The Dragon's Lair. I couldn't get images to work yet, but it looks nifty, and kids could do lots of things easily. I, though, like the idea of them building a wiki site with me and Becca rather than having little web-lets all over the place.

United Streaming AKA Discovery Education is way cool, but my Windows Media Player doesn't seem to be working. I can run it on my old WMP, but when I download one or just try to play it on the site, another WMP pops up on the dock and then quickly vanishes. Mysterious! Sounds like I'll have to pester the Paideia tech wizards.

Yackpack was down, but it doesn't sound like something I'd use right away. I'll check it out again later.

All in all, Mixbook for a field trip and the many offerings of Discovery Education seem the most useful for now, but wikis are still the most exciting tool I've found so far.

I also searched for some things on my own using seomoz.org, where I found Urban Spoon Atlanta Restaurants, which has descriptions and ratings of more than six hundred Chinese and East Asian restaurants!

There was some other nifty stuff out there, but nothing grabbed me as interesting in an ongoing way or applicable in my classroom.

Task 9 - Social Bookmarking with Delicious

Okay, time to go Delicious. I have a Delicious account, but this allows me to explore it more. Delicious looks different than depicted in the overview materials and tutorials. Some buttons are in different places, and it's organized a little differently. The CommonCraft video link didn't allow me to play it, since I am not a Friend of the sender. My favorite quote from the syllabus page is, "To actually visit a "discovered" site, try right-clicking the link and selecting "open in new tab" or "open in new window". That way, you won't lose your delicious results." Delicious results: I love it!

I searched for "China" and found more than a quarter million other user bookmarks. I explored some in English and some in Chinese. It's interesting to see all of a person's tag categories and get an immediate sense of their range of interests expressed on the net. I found China Web Radar, a site about Web 2.0 in China. When I searched Glorantha, I found only sites I already knew. I subscribed to the "Glorantha" tag to keep track of new game sites in my favorite setting.

I installed the Bookmarklet buttons into Chrome for easier access, and I uploaded all of my newer bookmarks from Safari to Delicious. I cannot find any sign that Chrome allows export of bookmarks, which is weird. Bookmarklets are not as quick or handy as the Delicious buttons that Safari and Firefox user have. I need to see if I can get it to run more smoothly. There's more jumping around among pages in the version I have compared to the one in the video.

I grouped some similar bookmarks into AsianAmericans as a bundle.

I looked up "China maps" among others' bookmarks. I added an interactive Shanghai subway map, Province Populations Compared to Nations, World as Chinese Zodiac Animals, China and the World Map of the Internet, a NYT interactive map on immigration, Maps of China with many more local maps, and a map of Chinese restaurants nationally and in Georgia. Then I added "pi20" as an extra tag for each of these sites in my Delicious account. That was easy with the edit button in Delicious.

I added Amy (avalk) to my network. I'd like to add other people. All in all, Delicious has yet to show its real potency, but that will surely take time as I accumulate links with other people that enjoy some of the same kinds of links.

Task 8 - Play in the Sandbox!

Sigh. I had to request permission to play in the sandbox. I applied on Saturday afternoon, and I didn't hear back until Saturday evening! I'll need to keep in mind the time delay, the human element, in such things, for they will also be there for my students. I was ready to go, and it was frustrating to have to wait. Enthusiasm!

It was easy to set up a new page in the Sandbox, once I figured out that my name needed to be added to the top of the list. When I tried to add it to the bottom, it kept being just an extension of Destinmarler's. From there it was mostly just messing around to make something interesting. Big Huge Labs is a fun site for playing with pictures. I liked the other image sites, but they were harder to use, though I did bookmark Grasshopper, You Too Can Write a Hit Kung Fu Movie. I hope you enjoy my sand castle! I got audio to work on Voki and created one for the bottom of my Sandbox page. Then I added some bits to Lina's and Martin's blogs.

I also created another blog on Blogger to start posting my thoughts on games and education. I also created a couple of new Wikispaces sites, one for my class with Becca and the other for the 2011 China trip. None of these sites have any content at this time, but they will!

Thing 8 - Stretch

Am I really supposed to call this entry "Thing 8"?

I read about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 on Wikipedia. It is valid complete, and well-written, at least for now. It grew from a few lines in 2002 to thirty-five PDF pages as of today. It has 133 end notes from a range of sources.

The article's discussion page runs for many paragraphs and is itself a wiki. Of course, it is, but people have to watch that page too. There are about ten items of discussion since the new year. Mostly they are discussions of revisions and issues. The first paragraph has the longest discussion and has numerous citations. Since there is still no agreement on what happened in that period of Chinese history, it's going to be hard to reach consensus on how to introduce it. All in all, the article is well done.