I saw this from someone else who is part of the Digital Writing Month adventure. This tool — Wibbitz — takes text and images, and turns it into a video teaser. Sort of interesting. Not sure how useful it is beyond the “cool factor,” though.
Peace (in the vid),
Kevin
Category Archives: Technology Resources
A Tool for Checking and Adjusting Privacy Settings
I saw this site — Adjust Your Privacy — in a newsletter from the fantastic Doug Belshaw, who found it at Lifehacker. The tool allows you to check out your privacy settings on various sites, and also provides a handy lists of places to check out how easily you can be “found” with the personal data that other sites have collected on you.
Be careful of what you share, and do your best to keep track of where you’ve been. I know it’s not easy. I spent just a few minutes using some of the tools and found that my privacy setting seemed OK, but it is a little odd to see how much personal information one can gain with the search queries they also have listed on the page. Worrisome, even.
Check out Adjust Your Privacy
Peace (in the snooping),
Kevin
Considering Stereotypes: The Gender/Digital Life Resource
My class is in the midst of creating a travel brochure for an imaginary world. The theme and idea could be just about anything, but the teaching has been around reading informational text (real travel brochures, the genre of information text) and then creating a fictional brochure with the same elements (plus, we tie it into the theme of Peace as part of our school’s affiliation with Peacebuilders.)
Yesterday, a girl came up to me, sharing her rough draft work with me. Her map showed a circular planet, divided in half by a roller coaster (a lot of them have echoes of theme parks, probably because we used Disney and other parks’ travel brochures for our initial investigation into the format). There were a bunch of symbols on the top and another bunch on the bottom. I squinted to see what they were. She asked me, “Which side of the planet do you think is the girls and which is the boys?”
It took me a minute to realize that she was creating a space for girls and a space for boys, and the symbols represented stereotypes of the gender (tiaras and dancing shoes for the girls, for example, and a game system and a football for the boys.) I used the opportunity to talk to her about stereotypes, but she just shook me off, and continued her journey around the room, polling kids on what symbols should be where on her map to represent boys and girls. I’ll be revisiting that issue later, maybe as a whole class discussions.
So, this morning, I was pleased to see this: CommonSense Media just released what looks like an interesting set of free lesson plans and resources built around gender identity and stereotypes related to the digital world, particularly around media and advertising. I do some of this during our Digital Life unit, but not enough. I’m going to use some of the ideas here to strengthen those discussions this year.
The resource is called Girls, Boys and Media: A Gender and Digital Life Toolkit
It’s worth a look. I’ll be digging into it.
Peace (in staying openminded),
Kevin
Featured on the InstaGrok Site
Our class did the most online searches last month with InstaGrok — a web-based too for gathering data and making sense of it — and the site featured our classroom. They asked if I might be willing to answer a few questions about how we use InstaGrok for our research projects. I did, and it gave me a chance to do a little reflecting on the things and approaches we were doing.
Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: The Masters are Messing with my Flow
The other day, I shared out a Google tool that allows you to have “characters” in a Google Doc “write” with each other. This video is from a related tool, in which you can collaborate with “masters” of literature – Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, etc. Google captures the real-time writing in the document and kicks out a link. I did a videoshot of my writing with the tool and then layered in some audio reflections of the experience.
You can “view” my live document here.
Peace (in the digital experience),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: Tagging and Defining Digital Writing
This month, as I am involved in Digital Writing Month, has me thinking about what I mean when I say Digital Writing. It’s not easy to define. Maybe you can help. I have started up a Thinglink image with a word cloud of terms related to digital writing, and I have begun to “tag” the image with ideas and media related to the terms. I’ve opened it up so that anyone can collaborate, so feel free to add your ideas to the mix, too. I’ve added assorted media — a podcast, an audio poem, a “choose your own adventure” video experiment, and more.
Come to my ThingLink and add a few thoughts.
And do you agree that this image, with the tags, is a piece of digital writing?
Peace (in the defining),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: Digi Gets Stuck in a Google Doc
Yesterday, I wrote about using the Google Search Story creator. Then, in the afternoon, I stumbled on a link to yet another Google story tool — Google Docs Story Builder. it’s .. pretty neat. It “captures” a Google Doc in video time, although you are really writing the doc as a story, and not necessarily as a real collaboration. In honor of Digi the Duck, the mascot of Digital Writing Month, I created this short piece with the story tool in which Digi gets stuck in a Google Doc.
Check out Digi in the Document
You can give it a try with the Google tool, too. If you do, share it out, won’t you?
Peace (in the doc),
Kevin
Digital Writing Month: Wrestling with Google and other Frustrations
Digital Writing: A Search Story
(You can listen to the audio podcast of this blog post, too. In case you want to hear my voice. It’s all about options for the experience, right? Audio and text and visual …)
It’s been fascinating to take part in the Digital Writing Month adventure, particularly as it has forced me to consider how my writing practices are impacted by technology. And that exploration has raised the question once again: is technology transforming and changing the way we write? I’ve noticed, as I follow others in Digiwrimo, that much of what we are calling digital writing is mostly blog posts — texts on a page. Or Tweets. Sure, a digital page, but still, I would not term it something all that different from traditional writing, except audience. So what does it mean to write digitally, then? I don’t have that answer, although the question intrigues me. But this morning, as I was trying to think about how I might compose with video, I returned to the Google Search Story site. Here, you can create a short digital story with search engine queries. I was curious about the process that I would put myself through to try to tell a story or make a point, with limited text and with the video coming from somewhere else. In other words, I had less agency as a writer than I would have liked. (And, admittedly, I was contributing to Google’s bottom line by making a video with its search engine).
Here’s what I noticed as I was creating a search story about Digital Writing Month and the act of writing digitally: I found myself in a constant wrestling match with Google. You’d think it simple enough: write five or six search queries and let Google do the rest. But Google wasn’t doing what I wanted — its search results were different from my vision. I tweaked words. I revamped phrases. I worked harder on those five search phrases than I am working on this reflection piece. Seriously.
And I am still not satisfied, and it made me think about the compromises we make with technology when we compose with the tools available. Yes, it would be nice if we were all programmers with enough coding expertise to create our own tools for our own purposes, but most of us are not. I’m not. What I am left with is this feeling that while technology allows me to stretch in new directions, it also hinders my sense of expression. And I can’t shake the feeling that we are not yet close to the promise of being real digital writers, when all of the agency of expression is in our own hands.
When we can write what we want to write, and say what we want to say, in a medium of our choice and with all the flexibility we desire, I’ll be doing a happy dance as a digital writer. Until then, I push as far as I can, and hope that I can live with the sense of compromise that often is the result of the conversations between me, the writer, and the various tools of technology that are at my disposal.
Peace (in pushing boundaries),
Kevin
PS — I want to apologize for putting my own book — Teaching the New Writing — into my search story but it seemed pertinent. Right? Well, I was also using Google for my own aims there, too. If they can monetize my story through my use of its search engine, I might as well turn it back on them and use their search engine to publicize our book.
🙂
Project-based Learning: Explained
CommonSense Media Report: A View from the Classroom
CommonSense Media has released a new report culled from a survey of teachers on the topics of technology and media. The report is called Children, Teens and Entertainment: A View from the Classroom. At the site, you can download the full report or look at various elements of responses from teachers. I do wonder about the population of teachers who took part in the survey. I say that because there is some criticism about CommonSense Media and its mission around helping parents and teachers navigate the media-saturated world, and how the group sometimes comes across as a bit of fear-mongering. As for me, the teacher, I have found its resources for teaching about digital citizenship and digital footprints a wonderful resource. As for me, the parent, the site has not been necessarily all that insightful.
But I found this study interesting and while I might quibble with some elements of it, I do find it be a fairly honest assessment of teacher perceptions of the impact that technology is having on our students and children. Notice I said “perceptions” because part of me thinks, too, that if we judge the literacies of young people today (influenced by the media world, for sure) against the very traditional classroom learning environments, then there are going be things lacking.
I’d argue that we, as teachers, need to be finding ways to tap into those literacies of students, and not necessarily shift all of our teaching practices and expectations of students, but certainly, look for the intersections and ways to engage students. If these results are right, and writing and other areas of academics are getting worse due to technology and media, then we need to do more than recognize it and complain about it. We need to adapt to the changing environment, in meaningful ways for rich, interactive learning classrooms.
And, I would agree with Common Sense Media on this: we need to arm our young people with the critical thinking tools they need to see through the entertainment empire and shift from being consumers of media and technology, and becoming the creators of their own content, taking back agency in the digital world. There has never been a more critical moment for teachers to do this.
Stepping off my high horse, now, check out some of the findings from the report:
This was interesting, too, as they broke down the kinds of technology and media that seem to be negatively impacting learning. I wonder if this is a result of disconnect, and teachers not understanding the range of literacies that can go into playing a complex video game. (I’m not talking Angry Birds here)
And as a teacher and lover of writing, this section was intriguing and disheartening, all at the same time:
This perception of writing is no doubt influenced by the use of informal write/speak by students during formal writing assignments. U know what I mean, right? It may also be a result of shorter bursts of writing in their lives outside of school, and so, sustained writing activities are difficult. I see this in my classroom, and have found the need to do more and more graphic organizing, more thinking through a topic, and more strategies on how to stretch writing out in meaningful ways.
What do you think? Check out the report. Does it mesh with your perceptions?
Peace (in the data),
Kevin