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.

Task Seven - It's a Wiki Wiki World

At Amy's suggestion, I downloaded Google Chrome. She says it may allow me to access my bookmarks from more than one computer. I uploaded my bookmarks and folders (yes!) to Chrome and then synched it to Google Docs, so now I can synch it to any other computer I'm using. Well, that'll come in handy! I did elect not to transmit my user data to Google.

Martha and Brian's Class Wiki - Some parts are heavily teacher-created, but others are heavily kid. That's a fun mix. It doesn't look from the History pages that kids have altered pages that they shouldn't. I also like that more than one teacher, at the very least, can add to the pages. Right now, I have the class web page saved on my computer in iWeb format. Becca can't do anything to it except through my computer, which generally means telling me to do it. If we had a class wiki, she could upload anything she wanted or make modifications that would never occur to me. That could lead to all kinds of cool developments, even if the kids only start out making modest contributions. Another issue for me would be consistency in layout. I like a web site that has my name on it to look like I care how it looks and works, so I suppose my new job would be patrolling for layout. I guess I spent too much time laying out high school newspapers years ago! I definitely think a wiki is the thing to do for the next China trip. I can post everything there and have links within the pages to generate more student additions as well.

Again, what is best for kids to post online? How to protect their identity in doing so? Some things should be seen by everyone, but some should only be available to the kid and the teacher. I like the design of the Thousand and One Flat World Tales site, where fellow writers elect the writing of each other to publication. I'd like a wiki with private pages for just us and one or more public pages for posting our best work. The page on internet safety and etiquette is a great idea, and I am likely to copy it liberally!

I liked Carl's class wiki about Venezuela. It was kind of like a mini-Wikiepedia, where each student contributes elements. In this case, they are assigned sections. I liked Let's Go West and the Woodward fifth graders' site for the same reason. Hmmm. I'd like to figure out a way to mark students' work within a wiki without just giving them the full correction. I'll have to explore that.

Jay Monson's wiki links to his blog, where he posts messages and assignments. Having both and linking them is a good idea.

I tried to create a voki after I saw Jennifer Dorman's on her site, but Flash crashed in mid-process as I was trying to add audio. Other than the Voki thing, her site doesn't seem to have much else going on.

Wiki Walk-Through was helpful. It has loads of ideas, some of which I will swipe wholesale: student study guides, student-generated examples or encounters within a topic, reflections on trips or events, class FAQ,

book reviews, family traditions, travel photos with a class icon, math solutions, number library for each number (like a class Number Gossip), daily weather page, data from science classes and experiments, wiki debates, collaborative wiki with kids in another part of the world, our travel brochures project online instead of in print, student links to helpful sites, and so forth!

The remainder of the example wikis or the ones I stumbled across were mostly teacher-generated, linear, or simple. I have the urge to create a class wiki and move everything from the class web site in iWeb to the wiki! I should probably talk to Becca first.

Mark Wagner's podcast about wikis was helpful, though I had to marshall all of my attention abilities to listen to the whole thing carefully. It was sometimes hard to hear, and the birds were raucous demons in one section.

Google Reader is working well. I like checking and getting a quick dose of information. It also makes it clear which sites are generating content!

What's next?

Task Six - Cool Tools

First off, I added Eric Thomas to my reader. Then I set off to explore some coooooool toooooools.

Skype, http://www.skype.com -

I've had Skype on my computer since last year sometime. I hardly use it, but it's been good to be able to see people sometimes, my mother after the death of a good friend and Tami when she tries to help me untangle things on my computer. I called Amy and Brandon, but they were not online. I'll pester them more soon.

I liked Quizlet. They have Chinese flash cards! I had to play around with it for a while to get that hang of what it was asking for and how to play the games. I set up an account, and I plan to set up a set of flash cards for my Mandarin students.

I was not impressed with TeacherTube. I looked up China videos, and the first several had spelling errors. I can't use that.

Library Thing was cool! I plan to enter the classroom's books on China and Egypt, if only to keep track of them! Maybe something else useful will pop out of their forums, links, and other bells and whistles.

Shelfari looks similar to Library Thing but touts itself as a social network, which I don't need.

Flash Card Friends looks like it does something like Quizlet, so I'll keep it in mind.

Pixton for making web comics is pretty nifty but not something I'm going to do right away myself. I can think of several kids that could do magic with an account. The trick on using lots of these kinds of web projects is that the kids need an account. I suppose I could set up an account and give them all the password and have them all do their work on one account. Would that work for me and for the school safety guidelines? Toondoo is similar, seems a little more kid friendly.

30 Boxes is a calendar site. I still keep a paper pocket calendar.

I looked at Ta-da List. I like lists and use them all of the time, but Ta-da doesn't have the flexibility of subordinate lists within lists, and I would be nervous about storing my vital lists online and needing them away from online.

I created a glog at Glogster. It's fun, but it's not interesting to do it by myself in the long run. I could have the kids do one collectively.

Go!Animate is a cool animated cartoon creation site. I'd like to look at it with Becca and see if it's something we might use for Grammar movies some time. I liked the cartoon "Grease-Easy"! They also have coooool Star Trek cartoons. It's an amazing new world.

Prezi seems like a hip new power point in the hands of most. The creator seems to show the promise of coming at it from lots of directions, but most prezis seem linear. I liked one about social media. I have a hard enough time getting the kids to lay something out in power point, but it might be interesting to have one that we built all year.

Yesterday I tried to use Quizlet in Mandarin class, but it doesn't accept direct entries in Chinese. A few were in a user database, but most were not. That was a disappointment for me and for the kids. I've tried playing with it more on my own, but it doesn't look like it will work.

I changed a setting under Comments for my blog so that anyone could comment. Amy had some trouble commenting previously. I'll check back with her and see if that change did the trick.

Let's go see what's next! I need to try using more of this, successfully as it were, with my class.

Task Five - Feed Your Reader; Begin to Build a Reading Habit

Okay, Anna Watkins was right.... Readers work great!

I added three of my own web sites of interest to my Google Reader. The Escapist is a roleplaying game advocacy site, where I do a little writing too. Moon Design Studios publishes Glorantha, my favorite roleplaying setting. Guo Jian is a artist in China. I met him on my last trip, and now I can more easily keep up with changes to his website.

I also added reader links for everyone else in the current Pi 2.0 course. I already had Kemi from a previous exercise. I also added Bridget and Jo. They have shared a bunch of interesting thoughts, mostly around discovering, managing, and balancing technology for self and classroom.

I added Word of the Day from Dictionary.com as a fun site. Most of the others were not of interest to me. When I looked through the blog search engines and organizers, I found little to draw me. I don't read Sports, Entertainment, and so forth except as it intersects China

I made a custom News Feed at Google News. I had it search "China" and added the feeder link thus created to my reader. I checked results for "Glorantha", but it came back with only one source, that in French, so I think I already have the sites I need for my obscure hobby.

I like this reader system, though it has me looking back at my bookmarks to see what I should include and what I should move to a more systematic bookmark system. I have a gazillion bookmarks.

Now I am supposed to check my feeds for five to seven days to get used to reading them as a habit. I am eager to move forward with Pi 2.0, but maybe I should cool my heels for a bit and digest all of this.

Task Four - Getting Started with RSS

This was a pretty quick jump for me. Anna Watkins showed me a few things about RSS last year, and it looked nifty, but I never got started with it myself, as I have to form a habit and then I stick with it. I am finding it easier to think about it now, and having all of my frequent sites fed to a single site makes loads of sense. Now I just have to go through my mountain of bookmarks and see which ones I think I visit frequently. I've already shifted my main news sites for China to Google Reader and have been following them for the last week.

I can't find the "subscribe to this blog's feed" button at the bottom of the Tech & Learning blog site, and I don't want to subscribe to the whooooooooole site, as warned by the Pi 2.0 Masters. I did copy and paste a link within their blog page that seems to do the trick.

I checked out blogs from Tech & Learning, iLearn, and Infinite Thinking.

Tech & Learning

I found the article 100 Web Tools to Enhance Collaboration (Part 2) by Ozge Karaoglu. It led me to lots of other possibilities, which is one of the most helpful sorts of things I find on the net. Survs, a site for creating online surveys had promise. We could use it for all sorts of uses for it, though such surveys can also be done more casually or in the classroom with ActivVote, which I ought to try too. Still, it might be fun to use it as part of a collaboration with another school, say in China, if I ever manage to set up such a thing. Wikispaces, I've used, last summer in place of a blog. I found it as easy as this blogger and would like to use it again in the future. The issue with wikis, the couple of times I've used them, was how to motivate others, students, to contribute. Yuuguu seemed like Skype with more possibilities for sharing information. That seemed cool, but do I need it right now? There are so many methods and approaches out there, it's hard to find a standard in the emerging ideas. We might do something within our class but not be able to share it easily or duplicate it with another group, for they may well use something else.

Infinite Thinking Machine

This site had little for me. It consisted mostly of ads for prestigious speakers, not so useful for now. Some of them are surely interesting, but I have my issues with lots of listening, and much of it was business-oriented.

iLearn Technology

This led me to a couple of practical sites and one article I liked. Number Gossip is a cool database of information, mostly mathematical, about individual numbers. Stixy was pretty cool. It creates a virtual bulletin board, where we can place things all kinds of things - pictures, memos, images - together, but what would be okay for the kids to share? I know we'd get excited and then realize that we were inadvertently planning to or already had placed any number of things we shouldn't. I liked the article "Why Drill and Skill are Necessary in Education," for some of this seems to be lost in the shuffle of the latest whiz-bang technique or widget.

I like having the New York Times at my fingertips, and I've already enjoyed my links with NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. Scott Simon is the best in the business. Now off to more RSS discoveries!

Task Three - Blogging Two - Blogging Begins With Reading

I have my blog, so now I am finally arrived at the point to blog about blogs and blogging. Gracious!

Going through the task in order, I first sampled a bunch of the blogs on the list. Since I am usually searching the web in my own areas of interest, it was fascinating to see the range of sites, topics, and methods of presentations. I took notes on the sites as I explored them.

• Patrick's Update - sweet, well-written, I bet this lad passed fifth grade. I wonder how the kids' blogging is incentivized? I like them writing about writing, tips and such. This would take some training in internet discretion for my kids, and even then, we'd have to watch it.

• A Duck with a Blog - delightful, hilarious, and a great way to share the community's experiences

• AP Physics B - I just love Martin. What cool entries and links! impressive writing

• Natalie's Pithy Python - so well written, informative, and funny; a delight and a daunting bar

• EduBlog Insights - continuously learning to be literate, communities of discourse, knowledge as interconnected, voice and ownership, archiving (accessible); I think I'll have my students read and comment on this, at least to me.

• Mark's edtechblog - the kids' writing interested me the most; Mark is beyond me in technical knowledge.

• Atlanta on the Cheap - I'd love to find a site like this of which I could actually make use. They just don't have anything useful when I need it, and I don't succumb to the urge to do it now because it's somewhat cheaper.

• Seth's Blog - O, my goodness. He certainly has lots of good ideas, especially for business. He's generated an impressive amount of material. Is he doing it along for the most part? Business and discourse seems to be heading this way. How to sift through all of the verbiage?

Questions, questions, questions....

What do you notice about the genre of blog writing in general?

Much like my own blog, many of them have a more conversational tone compared to the informational sites I tend to visit. Most of the ones I read were well edited and presented. Some contained more formal parts, while other pages or entries were clearly intended to be more casual. The series of entries that comprise most of them remind me of letters home from a traveller, inspired by discoveries and new ideas.

(How) is blog reading different from other types of reading? How is it similar?

While I find some parallels in others' work with children, much of it is only of fleeting interest for me, so the main difference is personal incentive. I wouldn't read books on most of these topics. It occurs to me, though, that in some ways, I am more likely to read someone's comments on student writing, ducks, or business practices in blog form because I can be more selective and limited than I would need to be in order to glean something from a book. If I found something of interest, then I could pursue it further.

(How) is blog writing different from other types of writing? How is it similar?

It reminds me of keeping a journal. I expect any long-term blog of mine would combine notes, casual entries, and more formal presentations.

How does commenting contribute to the writing and meaning-making?

It would depend on the community of people making the comments. I've seen a bunch that were ridiculous or offensive. The blogs I explored today tended to have far fewer comments than more popular blogs, but they were better. I like the idea of kids commenting on some of one another's work.

Is there a "blogging literacy?" How does blogging affect the way we read and write?

The text of blogging itself is the same as traditional writing in almost all ways. Being able to archive and to link entries to one another and outside sites is novel and takes practice. As well, bloggers and their commenters need to learn how to navigate these activities, which is a bit different from blog site to blog site.

(How) can blogging facilitate learning?

I found Patrick's Update most illuminating in the regard. I'd like to have kids posting their work to blogs, some of which only I could read, others available to each other, maybe a few published to the wider net. I'd have to figure out how to do that at Paideia. It would be great to have them commenting on each other's work and ideas.

I am also thinking, as mentioned in my previous post, that I could create blogs for some of my own interests like China and roleplaying games.

Finally, it would probably do me some good to read more blogs. There are a few from and about China that I check occasionally but not much of anything else.

Addendum:

I added a comment to Kemi's blog and then googled how to add a hyperlink inside a comment in order to create a link back to my blog for her. The number one result of the search made sense to me, but it didn't work since the code apparently only directed it to look inside her blog webpage. I wonder how to fix that? I'll look more tomorrow. Hyperlinks have been so easy to create in writing the blog, but I don't see buttons in Kemi's blog to add such a link inside and comment, and the hypertext is beyond me to troubleshoot.

Task Two - Blogging One - Become a Blogger

Okay, so I've already chimed in a bit on today's adventures by editing my first two posts and adding some pesky parenthetical comments. As for Task Two, blogging....

The discovery audio was a good, quick overview of possibilities. Thank goodness! I have such a hard time sitting and listening to audio. I think this Pi 2.0 has taught me something very important about myself already, not to mention the technological discoveries, which I will now mention.

I've sort of had some experience with blogging with my China trip "blog" at Wikispaces. Amy counseled me to be careful with blogs in China, so I put all of entries into the trip wiki instead. It will be interesting to see how the somewhat different structure of an actual blog will feel different. Of course, no one added comments to my wiki.

I should create a blog for my Games and Education work, which has been torpid of late. Maybe I will just start with describing and discussing what I do in the classroom and in the afterschool and summer camp programs. Then, there's a blog about China, Ancient Egypt, China trip....

I did find it funny to hear someone saying, "People that want to hear what you have to say," in the audio introduction. I do get the valuable reasons for blogging then discussed there and in later material, but it raises laughable images of the constant Twitt and such. I think part of the reason I chuckle is just that it is so amazing that we can all do this kind of stuff!

Google Blog Search didn't produce much of interest. There's very little gaming and loads of China! I found Technorati a bit easier to use, but nothing really grabbed me enough to want to add it to my reader and read it all of the time. Unless I'm supposed to find something.

Again, I had to suppress a chuckle for the next article, "Blogging - It's good for you," but I get it! The article got my attention. I'd like to have kids write more about themselves, and blogs or wikis could be a good way to do that, as long as it was secure in some way. Blogs as journals, kvetching to teacher, class, community, and calming self and increasing understanding as in our class Issues meetings, that would all be good. For myself as a blogger, it's about balancing expression with development, though expression certainly sometimes is development, whether in insights in my own musings or someone else's reaction, but see quote above.

Connecting is such a huge part of Web 2.0. This creates opportunities and issues for my students, for I don't want them to connect with the wrong sorts of things or people. For me, it can all be an overload. I'm almost afraid that blogging, Facebook, and such, while rich in their own ways will connect me to enough people that I won't feel that I can interact meaningfully with them and end up retreating a bit, leaving us all less than satisfied. I want to be aware of my own predilections as I go forward into this brave new world.

Hey, this blogging thing is therapeutic! I wonder how many people want to read it?

Task One - What Is Web 2.0 and Why Does It Matter?

I've spent the last few days exploring all of the pages linked to Task One and found, heard, and saw lots of interesting ideas that were new to me.

Student-built wiki study guides jumped out at me early on from "A Day in the Life of Web 2.0" I'd like to do something with that. The other elements of "A Day" were either quite familiar or novel enough that I'll stick with my first idea and come back for more later.

(I wish I could use the Tab key to indent in most of these inline text boxes. Grumble.) [Ooooo, and now I can in Blogger! Most excellent.]

Then I went into the other link, "Web 2.0: A Guide for Educators." I was having fun, getting lost exploring, and not sure at time when I was still working on the assignment. I kept having to check back to the main text to be sure that I was following the drift of the assignment and article and not just exploring something I'd discovered along the way to the exclusion of following the authors' main ideas. As Bridget mentioned in her blog, I'm testing out the system like a real kid! I had to write an article this weekend too, so I left the Web 2.0 task page open and switched back and forth between my two homework assignments over the last couple of days. It seems to have worked.

Anyway, I like Google Reader but don't like Bloglines, as it is much more cumbersome to enter sites. I also re-inroduced myself to delicious. It's cool to be able to have my bookmarks online, but I don't like the way it organizes them. I guess it's handy to be able to share link interests like Facebook, but it seems to be more work than handy. In the end, I want to have my bookmarks and other such discoveries in one place and not be updating multiple databases. For now, having them all in Safari works just fine.

[I think a bunch of links above might not work since they are my personal accounts. I need to find out what to copy and paste to give people the accessible link.]

[I just tried to make the Facebook one work. I can't find an alternative to my own login for the other two. Hmmmmm.]

I actually like working in Firefox better, but some setting in my computer's system, even though it's new won't allow me to download anything, so I mostly stick to Safari.

Next were the blogs and podcasts. I found that for me, they take a lot of sitting time to absorb. I can't do much else while I listen, yet they have a hard time holding my attention with just audio. I'm better with a book or a video.

I think that covers my adventures thus far....

Won't it be interesting when the internet can transmit smell and taste? Maybe.

Task One - First Entry

This is my first blog ever, so I named it 一路平安, Yilu Ping'an, which means "Have a safe journey," much like Bon Voyage. My next task is to transfer my Writeboard posting to this blog, so I will create another entry.