Paul Allison (quickly) released the Google+ hangout conversation from Wednesday night over at Teachers Teaching Teachers, where topics ranged from school gardening and local food projects to the use of the Youth Voices social networking space for writing. Here is the video of the night’s conversations.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
Last night, I participated with Paul Allison and a bunch of other interesting folks in my very first Google+ Hangout space, which is the videoconferencing component to Google+. We were on Teachers Teaching Teachers, talking about issues ranging from the Maker’s movement (DYI activities with students) to creating school gardens to using the Youth Voices online space for the upcoming school year to developing an environmental focus for the year (or, that is my direction anyway). It was an interesting experience to be in a video chat room with Hangout with these folks.
Here are a few day-after observations:
Not sure about how Google+ might be used in an educational setting? Check out Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways to Use Google+ collaborative slideshow. There are some interesting ideas developing on that slideshow, including how to possibly use Hangout for conferencing and making connections with other learners and teachers, and virtual field trips.
Peace (in the hanging out),
Kevin
I am starting to do a little work to get ready for the upcoming school year. One of my tasks is to “archive” the four spaces on our BitStrips community where my students last year did various webcomics. Bitstrips does a neat thing: it creates a “class photo” of all of the users, with their webcomic avatars. I was checking out the four classes the other day, laughing at the ways in which young people ‘create and show’ themselves with webcomic creators.
Here are my four classes, just before I put them into the archive bin to make way for this coming year’s crop of students.
Peace (in the remembering),
Kevin
This week’s Day in a Sentence uses the new Wiki function at Edublogs.
Please follow this link to the wiki (or you can scroll down the right side navigation to the Wiki header)
Kevin
Maybe it was a busy week, or maybe the metaphor theme threw people off, but we had only three Days in a Sentence contributed this week. Wait. “Only” is the wrong way to phrase that. I am always happy to get contributors. So, to rephrase, I found three wonderful Days in a Sentence in the bin this week. Thanks to Bonnie, Rita and Tracy.
Here they are, using metaphor for their sentences:
- I’m enjoying this morning, sitting on my front porch feeling the breeze that is a wave of cool water, refreshing after the oven the summer has been so far. — Tracy
- Returning from the Farmer’s Market with Jersey Tomatoes, Sweet Corn, and Green Vegetables to create a colorful countertop collage of summer’s healthy invitational. – Rita
- Give me a 7-year-old, a bag of Half-Naked popcorn and we are walking with Harry in his Deathly Hollows. Cheering right to the end! – Bonnie
See you later this week for another call for reflective words!
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin
One of the more fascinating elements of being part of a network is that interesting discussions can emerge suddenly. This the journey of one particular thread that begin on one platform, moved into another, and then had a slight echo on a third. The experience had me thinking about how ideas “move” and also, how temporary they can be.
It began with my RSS. I get the increasing sense that more and more people are dropping out of their RSS readers for other ways to gathering content (just as I get the sense that blogging is now falling by the wayside for many people). But I still regularly read my RSS feeds, and yesterday, I found a post from Bill Ferriter, whose work and whose writing at The Tempered Radical I greatly admire. I am always interested in what he has to say.
His piece — entitled “Wondering (Worrying) about Graphic Novels” — certainly caught my eye. In it, Bill reflects on the possibility that graphic novels should not necessary be put into the vein as serious literature, and that despite the push by many (myself, included) to bring graphic novels into the classroom, he wondered if they really helped students as readers. He was questioning, more than criticizing, and so I ventured over to his blog.
There was already a very long queue of comments (it probably didn’t help that Bill ends his post by comparing graphic novels to The Jersey Shore in terms of substance), and I added my own thought about it being helpful to question everything we bring into the classroom, and that there are bad graphic novels, just as there are bad novels. And there are great graphic novels, just as there are great novels. What graphic novels bring to the table is a form of visual literacy, nuance, inferential thinking, etc, that many of the commentators noted.
As I usually do with posts that pique my interest, I shared Bill’s post on Twitter and on Google+, figuring I had some book-friendly friends who might be interested. They sure were.
Within minutes, a fast-moving, passionate defense of graphic novels was underway, and Bill himself jumped into the mix. I had trouble keeping up with the conversation but what I sensed was that here was the reason that I use Twitter — for sharing of ideas, for questioning of ideas, for passionate talk about things that matter. It was as if we were hanging out in the coffee shop. I felt bad because I had to leave the conversation early for a family thing but the talk continued long after I left.
Over on Google+, meanwhile, only Paul Hankins and I were briefly chatting it up, and in some ways, Google+ became a slight backchannel to the Twitter conversation that began as a blog post in my RSS feed. I find that amazing. You could argue that that is way too much media/tech for any conversation, but I find it a rich path of dialogue with each medium bringing something different to the texture of the discussion:
Peace (in the reflective thought),
Kevin
(From time to time, I try to get my funny bone working and crank out a few posts that are intended to be funny. Hilarious, even. They don’t usually work as funny material to anyone but me but that doesn’t stop me from writing them. I’m sorry you have to read them. My condolences. — the editor)
Mobile App Development Lab
Date: July 2011
The Pitch: Come up with an app that forces kids to clean their room. But makes the task so fun they will want to do it again and again! Also, provide incentive for parent to be “involved” with their child with this app (see, taser). And make sure there are plenty of embedded advertisements.
The Name: Clean Your Room or Die Trying
How it Works: A parent or parent figure buries a gold doubloon inside of a dirty sock on the floor of the room. The teenager has one minute to clean up all of the dirty clothes from the floor and find the gold doubloon before time expires. The app shows a video of the room, so that the player is working in “virtual reality” and uses the GPS transponder to find lost socks (worth five points), underwear (10 points), assorted shoes (10 points) and shirts and pants (15 points). The taser is used to ensure the game does not end before the goal is accomplished. Liberal use of the zapper is allowed.
Reward: The gold doubloon is really a piece of chocolate wrapped in cheap gold foil. The “winner” gets the chocolate. But any foil left on the floor is suitable grounds for an additional zap from the taser.
Playbility: Hours of fun, and the taser is adaptable for many parenting moments.
Cost: Free version (no taser); $19.99 (with taser). Embedded advertising for home medical kits and legal services is recommended.
Peace (in a clean room),
Kevin
Scott McLeod, of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, has annually put out a call to educational bloggers to join him in offering advice to school administrators on the ways of the digital learning environment. Scott hopes that by bringing more administrators into the fold, the more likely it is that substantial changes will take place in the schools where they lead. I agree.
Today is Leadership Day and if you follow Scott’s blog, he will no doubt be posting a link to all of the blog posts that are being shared on this day. Here is mine, done as a comic. Now I know that not everyone is going to take my messages here seriously, because it is a comic. But I suspect there will be a lot of different posts with writing only, so I wanted to go in a different direction. I tried to put some of the ideas that I have heard from my students into the comic strip, as best as I could.
or see it here as a full-page comic. (You can also view it directly on Flickr):
Peace (in the influence),
Kevin
(Note: I am trying my hand at humor this week. Whether it works or not … I’m not sure, but I am having fun with it. )
I don’t know about you, but I don’t live too close to the ocean so all this hoopla over Shark Week goes right over my head. I don’t encounter enough sharks to make it worth my while to worry about them (famous last words?). But squirrels? We’ve got more squirrels than you can shake a nut at.
So here, then, are my Five Reasons Why Squirrel Week Should Replace Shark Week in the imagination of the public:
Peace (in the week),
Kevin
Got any metaphors lying around? Put them to good use with this week’s Day in a Sentence, as I ask you to boil down your week or a day in your week into a single sentence that is built around a metaphor. Then, use the comment link on this post to share your sentence. I will be compiling them all into a single post, or some format, and sharing out early next week. It’s a great way to be reflective and to be part of a writing community.
Come join Day in a Metaphor.
Here is mine:
After months of having no name at all, my rock and roll band suddenly became a mysterious figure under the guise of our new moniker, Duke Rushmore.
I hope you can join us, too.
Peace (is a huge rainbow),
Kevin