It's March Madness. Go Spartans

Thing #12 Rollyo

Susan Geiger tells me that Rollyo has been around for a long time (in Web 2.0 terms which is apparently measured somewhat like dog years), but somehow I had never run across it. This could have saved me lots of craziness.

If you read my post on RSS feeds you know that I follow a ridiculous number of blogs and since I read them in an RSS reader (Google Reader) I don't have a lot of visual cues to help me tell them apart. So lots of times I will read about something on the fly and later can't remember which of the 9 educational or 7 political or 8 tech blogs that I follow reported on it. So a Rollyo that searchs the blogs that I read regularly can let me look up that entry that I read a week ago and now can't quite remember where it was reported.

Wow, this should save some of that hair that I start pulling out when I can't find that very relevant post I need to win that argument make that salient point next time I am in a desperately heated fight lively exchange of ideas.

Thing #11 Web 2.0 Apps and Ning

One of my favorite Web 2.0 apps did not make the cut of the award winners that the library recommended, but it is a terrific hybrid tool that uses the "cloud" and also has interfaces for most of your web-able appliances (computers, phones and the like).

Evernote uses both a web interface and applications you can download to your computer (Mac and Win), iPhone or Windows Mobile device to set up notebooks that are stored on the web. You can also use their website to access your notebooks and add notes that you clip from other websites with their browser tools. You can add text, photos, web clippings, email clippings, screenshots, voice notes and attachments of all sorts and then organize them using tags and folders.

It's very cool. I use it for things like sharing grocery lists with my partner who can input items on the list online that I can access later on my iPhone at the store. At Christmas time I would take pictures with my phone and note prices of things I wanted to buy for the kids but first wanted to discuss with her. "No, don't buy that. I already found the bike for Daniel." "Oh." I say "Oh." alot in those conversations. Evernote doesn't really help with that part of the discussion.

Web 2.0 and 23 Things in Action!

Bridge Infrastructure
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

While completing Thing #6, I ran across The Rachel Maddow Show's Photostream on Flickr where they have show and user content posted and I blogged on an motivational poster created in Automotivator.

Also on the Photostream was an invitation to submit your own posters. I submitted this one in which I used a photo available for non-commercial use and remix under the Creative Commons license.

Yesterday, I went to check out the site and found that my poster was one of 14 posted on a new page on MSNBC.com called Maddow Fans Get Motivated. Check it out!

You, and you, and you got to give them hope.

The morning after the Oscars and Sean Penn's win for his seamless portrayal of Harvey Milk, it does well to remember the voice and words of the real man.

Hope helps us keep a grip on our teaspoons.

Thing #10, If you don't like Change, you're going to like Irrelevance even less

 Personally, I like Image Chef. 

Thing #9, Week #4: New Found Classroom Blogs

Here's a look at some new and not so new blogs that I dug up on Technorati and a few other places.

• Throughlines -- When I first started reading this blog the author, Bruce Shauble, was chair of the English Dept. at Punahou School in Honolulu. I stopped reading for a while and when I returned I found he is now the Director of Instruction. He's a teacher, artist, photographer and an incredibly thought provoking writer. Well worth reading.


• The Thinking Stick -- This blog by Jeff Utrect from the International School in Bangkok has an abundance of great info about educational technology, curricular design and 21st Century skills.


• Education.Change.Org -- Part of the larger Change.Org site, this group blog features lead blogger Clay Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator and humanities teacher who is passionate about 21st Century school reform.


• Practical Theory -- Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy,  an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning that opened its doors in 2006 in Philadelphia. Very exciting things are happening there including the most recent EduCon Conference.

Thing #8 Week #4: RSS

Oh, the goodness of Google Reader. Reader is just one of the many good Google things that have captured my heart, but it is undoubtably the one that I use the most often. (Even now that I am blogging regularly on Blogger.)

As I mentioned when I was discussing my blogroll (which is simply a select slice of my Google Reader imported into Blogger), I follow about 20 blogs on a semi-regular basis. That was before I started following everyone's blog from 23 things. Now my RSS feed count is up to about 90.

Google Reader lets you organize your feeds into folders so I have folders for 23 things, Fun & Family, Education, Technology and Politics.

Fun & Family includes blogs of friends, ParentHacks, MSU Football Scores and Giants Scores. Sports scores are available for most pro and college teams at Totally Scored, but their site seems to be down right now. The sports scores RSS feeds are great ways to make sure that the info I want comes to me. 

Actually that's true for all of my feeds. Google Reader also has the option to either view all articles, all new articles, all of each post or just the headlines which can be expanded. I prefer to see just the headlines and only new posts, which lets me scan and read selectively. 

Also since some of the feeds like ThinkProgress have 15-20 posts per day, I love the option that allows me to "Mark all as read" when I occasionally get behind on keeping up with the news. I can read a few headlines and then just move along. That's the semi-regular part.

Google Reader interface for creating a shared/public version of your feed reader is a little clunky. It doesn't really have the look and feel of Google Reader, but you can see posts from some of the feeds I follow. 

Take a look here: http://tinyurl.com/cvuqn2

BYOS and Students Authoring Their Own Learning, or what Stephen Sondheim, Joss Whedon and You have in Common

Last week I had a delightful talk with Angela Demmel about the difference between watching ballet and modern dance in terms of the amount of information and text you get to help you bring meaning to the art you are seeing. One gives you a complete narrative; the other expects you to construct your meaning with only 3 or 4 lines of text to point you in the right direction.

Then while completing a series of classroom walkthroughs, I had the pleasure of watching one of Cheryl Steeb's classes in which she posed the questions, "Is the organization of this essay arbitrary? Is anything a writer decides arbitrary?"

Over the weekend, I heard a great interview with Joss Whedon who recounted a conversation he had with Stephen Sondheim about the experience of finding audiences who see more than they intended or ever saw in their own work.

Whedon spoke eloquently to the point that the difference between craft and art was the difference between creating a work which attempts to embody something for everyone and creating a very specific and individual work to which everyone will bring their own experience and subtext. He told an amusing story of upbraiding some fans who claimed to have found some subtext that he did not believe existed in his work. After he accepted an invitation to visit their website and saw their deconstruction of the episodes in question, he issued an apology to them for discounting their analysis. He said that was when he started believing in BYOS or Bring Your Own Subtext.

So I started to think about how that applies in our classrooms. No matter what we think we are presenting in the class, and no matter how clear we think the "obvious" conclusions are, we always have to leave room for the students who bring their own subtext to our work.

When discussing curriculum design and classroom planning, we often speak about the need make our classrooms student centered. What can be easy to forget is that, regardless of where the locus of control in an assignment is, from the student's point of view it is always student-centered. They are always the author of their own learning, but one of the things we have control over is how easy or difficult we make it for them to bring their own subtext, bring their own experiences to the center of the curriculum.

Another way to think about this is the difference between a classroom in which learning is the central focus vs. one in which teaching is the central focus. How challenging is it for us as teachers to let go of our desire to always fill the void with our teaching, when sometimes it is more effective to let the students fill the void with their learning? Well, very challenging, of course.

I'm not saying that teachers are control freaks, but I have heard more than one of my colleagues admit that one of the reasons they became teachers was so that they could write on the blackboard. How disappointing then to arrive in the 21st century where the boards aren't even black anymore and students get to be the center of attention.

But I am encouraged as I do the classroom walkthroughs and I see teachers edging toward the turning over of the center to the students. I am heartened as I watch all of us doing the 23 things and making public our status as learners as well as teachers. And I am proud of us.

Thing #7, Week #3: The Kindness of Strangers, Community and the Internet

Yesterday I was the beneficiary of a kindness from a stranger. As I was walking up the path to school at 7:58, the driver of a truck pulled into the front drop-off circle, rolled down his window and called out to me that I had left my lights on. Then he drove around the circle and exited back out to Mission Blvd. I had been parked facing Mission; he must have noticed my lights, seen where I was walking and stopped to help me avoid a AAA call later that afternoon for a dead battery. 

Nice. 

We don't always get to see such evidence of random acts of kindness in our daily lives, but I have been ruminating on one of my favorite things about technology that lets me see many more instances of the kindness of strangers impacting my life. 

Connections. It's all about the connections. And community. 

Sometimes it's intentional communities centered around a common interest. Sometimes it's accidental or casual or even anonymous. 

For example, I belong to an online community that has been amazingly supportive and helpful to me in the last couple of years that is full of women who I am likely to never see in person. They are scattered across the US and Europe (Minneapolis, Austin, Oregon, Provincetown, Savannah, Amsterdam, Berkeley -- okay, I see the one in Berkeley all the time) and yet they reach out to me when I need advice, support or just checking up on. 

But I also rely on the generous nature of literally millions of people about whom I will never know the slightest thing except that they post information on the internet. Often, I'm just looking for an answer to question that has piqued my interest. (Who was Belle Barth? When did Edwin Booth die?) Thank goodness for Wikipedia and all the people who make it work!

And I think I must sit down at our kitchen computer at least 4 or 5 times a week to look up a recipe. My family reaps the benefit of cooks far better than I who have taken the time to post their favorite recipes. And I love that I can compare 4 or 5 or 12 different variations to come up with something that will fit my family's taste and pantry.

Recently it got more personal as I attempted to recreate my mother's version of my paternal grandmother's Portuguese Beans (not the Hawaiian variety). I lost the recipe years ago and recently began craving them. I started out with recipe sites and Google searchs, augmented that with consultation with real live Portagees like Bernie Puccini, and am getting closer every batch. 

My favorite of the recipes I found was on a webpage with a brief explanation of how the writer's mother always kept a pot on the back burner of the stove for his dad. It was sweet and personal and his recipe was very close to my mother/grandmother's recipe. I'm grateful to him for posting it. 

The good news is I'm now making the beans weekly, until I feel like I get it right, and my daughter loves them. So thanks to the generosity of strangers, one of my family traditions gets to live a little longer.

P.S. Here's a link to a paper at the Pew Research Group from 2007 about the way community is changing online, Communities, Learning and the Internet. Among the interesting points made, 84% of internet users belong to some kind of online community and those communities are varied, socially meaningful, and rely on their members to filter and assess information for their groups.  Hmm.

Change: New Technologies for Old

I love most of what I see at the Heretik, but I really hummed when I saw this one.
When Chicken Little Blogs

It punches a ticket for my mind on several trains of thought.

• It makes me think of Marek Breiger.
  
• It reminds me a recent post on Will Richardson's blog about how new technologies are never as good as old technologies when they start, but soon eclipse them, so if you don't take the plunge with the new at the expensive of some temporary inefficiencies you will be left behind.
  
• It reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube videos, Introducing the Book.
• It makes me smile.
  

Thing #6, Week #3: Infrastructure! and my Wii Badge

Infrastructure!
Originally uploaded by The Rachel Maddow Show

This is an image that I saw tonight on the Rachel Maddow show. It was submitted to Rachel's Photostream on Flickr. I didn't know if you could blog off of someone else's photostream, but I just went ahead and gave it a try and here we are. Susan assures me that this is OK in terms of copyright issues as long as the image links back to the public photostream.

This image was made with a 3rd party app called automotivator that lets you create motivational posters, or pointed sarcastic posters, whichever you prefer.

wii pass
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

This very cool Wii Pass was made with Badge Maker which is one of fd's Flickr Toys. There are lots of other great tools/toys you can use with Flickr on this site,, including a Warholizer, a Hockneyizer and another version of the motivational poster tool.

Even though this badge is extremely slick, it will probably be of no use whatsoever in getting my son to let me play on our Wii without him.

Thing #5, Week #3: Teaspoons, Flickr, Making Change

Teaspoons
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

So I have had a flickr account for the longest time but I have never used the link to my blog or taken advantage of the email to blog feature before. That was the challenge that I set for myself for this Thing #5, Week #3.

"Why teaspoons?," you may ask. Well, I have been keeping my eyes open for the last few days trying to find something to photograph with my iPhone that I could send directly to my blog via Flickr. Tonight while I was cleaning the kitchen, the teaspoons caught my eye and connected with a train of thought and I grabbed my phone and started snapping. Then I emailed it here via my blog link with Flickr.

I have been very frustrated with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back progress of the Obama administration and tonight I started to think about the words of another ground breaking African American, Florynce Kennedy who was a real live radical feminist back in the 70's and who said "Just by nobody doing nothing the old BS mountain just grows and grows. Chocolate-covered, of course. We must take our little teaspoons and get to work. We can't wait for shovels."

It is terribly frustrating to try to move a mountain with teaspoons (or empty an ocean with teaspoons as the feminist blogger Melissa McEwan aka Shakespeare's Sister writes about), but the work must be done and if all we have are teaspoons we can't just sit around and whine about how we don't have shovels. If the political process is impaired, it is still a way in which we can make change. Even if it is one teaspoon at a time.

Making changes in our classrooms and schools also sometimes feels like teaspoon work; it only happens little by little. But we have to keep moving the teaspoons. Some folks have voiced skepticism about how many teachers and staffers who have been enticed to try the 23 Things by the jeans incentive will fall by the wayside or will only employ skills they already have. Skeptics may be right that not all of us will exit this learning experiment with new skills in the double digits, but if some slice of our group takes just one new skill or one new classroom application away from these weeks, then we will have moved some of that school change mountain over just a little bit.

Thing #4, Week #2: Look at my cool BlogRoll

So I just registered my blog with the wonderful women of the MCHS library. 

Did you see my cool BlogRoll? Most of these were imported from my Google Reader account where I follow about 20 blogs on a semi-regular basis. Some of those blogs update very often (10-15 times a day) and some quite infrequently. Several of the ones I did not include are both seasonal and reflect very specific personal interests (Giants scores, MSU football scores -- RSS is a great way to get scores updated all in one place).

The blogs I listed in my BlogRoll reflect 2 or 3 of my major interests, education, technology and news/politics. I would especially recommend Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed for discussions about education reform and technology and Think Progress for news with a progressive outlook. I also really like Indexed for a little lighthearted appeal. Oh, and I'm a great big fangirl of local-really-smart-girl-made-good Rachel Maddow. 

Check it out.

Things in no particular order: Week #1 Thing #1

If this blog didn't have a name already, I might have named it Working Ahead, Skipping Around -- 23 Things in no particular order. 

I promise after this I will be more linear in my approach to this project.

So what do I think about this program? I AM SO EXCITED! I can't wait to see what my colleagues put together and I can't wait to see how things change in classrooms as people get their feet wet. 

Thinking about the lifelong learning piece is very intriguing as well. Have we talked as a school about how we set about helping our students achieve this ESLR? It is a bit of a paradox. Like parenting, the end goal is putting yourself out of business. Equipping students in a classroom to learn outside a classroom. Teaching students not to need a teacher. I feel as though when we wrote that ESLR we were speaking about an ambition to have such dynamic learning happening in the school that our students would become something like learning addicts who would be motivated to go out and get some more learnin', with or without us, but have we really looked at our methods for modeling lifelong learning outside the classroom from inside the classroom. 

I'd like to get in a small room with a bunch of our teachers with some coffee and carbs and start talking about this. Or you could leave a comment.

7 1/2 Habits: Week #1 Thing #2

So here are the 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners

Begin with the End in Mind
Take Responsibility for Your Own Learning
View Problems as Challenges
Have Confidence in Yourself as a Learner
Gather Your Toolbox
Use Technology to Your Advantage
Mentor Others
Play

At the risk of sounding immodest, most of these I do pretty well. I am, after all, a tech head who is over 50. I must have been learning something along the way. But clearly I do have favorites. And while I am sure that most people might guess that the toolbox and tech options would be easy choices for favorites, they would actually come in below most of the others. When I look with an eye to what is easiest and hardest for me, it doesn’t take long to really see this list as bracketed by my least and most favorite habits.

Let’s start with what is easy.

Play.

That’s easy and natural and it’s hard for me to think that playing isn’t the easiest most natural way for everyone to learn. When I am playing, I can learn at my own pace and I can veer off on as many tangents as I am interested in (I love the whole concept of hypertext and hyperlinks because they help speed up the way I connect things to a larger context.) I actually kind of resent that play only gets mentioned as the 1/2 of a habit. I know the author was trying to ride the coattails of Stephen Covey, but still, 8 is 8 and that habit should not have some kind of second class membership in this habit list.

What’s hard?

Begin with the end in mind.

It’s so directive. It reminds me of required reading (which I will never choose over reading whatever catches my fancy). It seems borderline fascist to me. Okay, I’m kidding. I get it that you need goals and need to make choices with the goals in mind, but still it is the hardest on this list for me. Most of my actual lifelong learning has been in areas where my goals were pretty fuzzy. Things like “I like history. I should read some popular non-fiction about history.” and “Oooo, what a cool web site with a way to edit my photos!!!” Which isn’t even really a goal at all.

My first 16 years of education were so goal directed/driven, in ways that were not necessarily positive or productive, that it has seemed like ever since then I have been extremely resistant to the “required reading” portion of my lifelong learning. So many of the best things that I learned in school during those first 16 years were incidental.

Some of what I thought was most interesting about the presentation was the list of presumptions about learning that we are being asked to let go of as life-long learners.

Look at this list. How many of us are willing to cross out all or most of these things when it comes to our students here at Moreau? How many of us fear crossing out some of these things when planning for our classrooms? We are very attached to many of the things on this list. We ARE one the things on this list. And we are supposed to be preparing our students to be life-long learners. How’s that for an ESLR coming back to bite you in the butt?

Adding an Avatar/Skipping Ahead : Week #2 Thing #3

I know I haven't done the Week 1 exercises yet, but I already have this blog and so I am skipping ahead. This is actually an old blog that I created on Blogger back in 2006 and that has been sitting around gathering cobwebs since then. So now I am dusting it off and getting it ready to use the 23 Things. I also have an old avatar that I created in Yahoo back when I was doing the fantasy baseball gig on Yahoo, so I wanted to reclaim that as well.

I freshened up the avatar a bit, but am always disheartened that in the world of the internet, there are no fat avatars. You can find "plus-size" options in some programs, but the plus apparently only reflects that they are larger than size zero. It would seem that the makers of avatar authoring programs believe that they know that everyone wants to be skinnier online. And on Yahoo! at least the options outside of "plus-size" seem to be supermodel thin. *Sigh*

Connie and I searched for a long time (okay, it was only about 10 minutes) for how to add my avatar exported from Yahoo to my Google controlled blog. It's a little bit like trying to get your old country Catholic grandma to fit in at your mother-in-law's seder. But I think I finally have it figured out. The exported avatar is configured in html so I should just be able to add it here and get it to show up in the blog entry using the html coding function.



Connie says that means that it will descend out of sight as I make more entries. That's really okay with me.
...
And now I just figured out how to add it to the side with an "Add HTML/JavaScript" gadget. Ooooh so cool.

Blogging at NECC

So here I am finally at NECC in San Diego. There have been some challenges in getting in and getting registered since HUSD apparently dropped the ball in getting my registration in through the NCLB funds.

Anyway, first session
21st Century Skills and High School Reform



I am encouraged by looking at the 21st Century Skills framework and thinking about how close it is to Moreau's ESLRs and to our overarching mission and goals.


Core Subjects
Learning and Thinking Skills
ICT skills
21st Century Skills
Life Skills

Wish there was more about assessment tools. Will try to catch up with this group later on assessment tools.

Second Session:Planned Improvisation: Technology Supported Learning in the Social Studies Classroom

First of all, very cool that they are using live iChat to have a co-presenter who is in another part of the country waiting for his wife to go into labor.

Panic Attack in the PDR

So something happened to me this week that hasn't happened in a long time. I was in the middle of a meeting and I started to have a panic attack. We were discussing the moving schedule for the upcoming renovation of the school and even though nothing that was being said was really news to me, the actual verbalization of the dates when classrooms will have to be cleared so that the contents of the library can be moved into them sent me a little over the edge.

It wasn't really a full blown panic attack. I didn't start to hyperventilate or break into a sweat, but my vision did swim a little and it did feel like the room was pressing in on me in a very unpleasant way. I could hear the pitch of my voice rise when I spoke and I just really wanted to be out of there in a hurry.

Good news: I didn't actually dash for the door. Bad news: we still have to move that whole damn library into Garin in a hurry at the end of the year. Awcck!

This has been a very challenging year. We are asking a great deal of ourselves and one another. This makes it all very exciting and mostly I have been eager to get in on this excitement. I want to think that all of this tumult (the renovation, the 4oth anniversary, WASC, the laptop initiative) can be opportunities for me to help to really improve the school. I have a chance to be involved in making a difference that will last for at least a few years. But, oh my, on Tuesday, I so sincerely wanted to head for the hills.

Is it any wonder that some people hate change when even those of us who love it let it make us a little crazy from time to time.

Starting a Blog

A long time ago, my friend Becky and I were discussing how memory works. She asked how I managed to remember so many details that seemed inconsequential to her. I said that it was easy to remember things in context and that you just needed to find the way that everything connected. She asked how everything was connected, and I replied, "Well, you believe in God, right? So everything is connected."

Now, she seemed to find this a particularly unhelpful, if not inane, reply. And later it occurred to me that her observation about my memory for useless trivia did not imply that this was an ability that she wanted to emulate. Nevertheless, years later now, I often think about this conversation and about the ways that I try to create context in my life to facilitate my learning and teaching. Hopefully, as I use this blog to demo some educational uses of the blogosphere, I will be able to create some context for the colleagues with whom I work and help them remember more than just inconsequential details.