Voting With Their Check Books September 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion, Tools.add a comment
Very interesting new mashup from Google lets you see who donated money in the current presidential race. Zoom in and check to see who made the donation, how much they donated, and to which candidate the contribution was made. I doubt the individual contributors realized their names, addresses, and political leanings would be made this easily viewable on the web, but it is quite interesting to see which of my neighbors have pitched in and to which campaigns. Hours if not minutes of fun!
Are You Smarter Than an 8th Grader? September 16, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Opinion.add a comment
I’m not a big proponent of standardized tests, but maybe because I understand how tests are often constructed, so my results don’t always reflect what I know but rather what I know about the test. Anyway, here are a couple of fun little 10 question tests to take in Math and Science to see how you stack up against 8th graders from around the world. At the end you get to see national scores to see how your 8th graders stacked up. Of course, what is actually stacked remains a subject for discussion. This came by way of a post by Lucy Gray.
Tried to embed the quiz directly in the post, but something keeps getting edited out when I save. Either visit Lucy’s blog (always a good idea) or try this link to take the quiz.
http://www.edin08.com/dataquiz.aspx
Transference of Learning September 13, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion.add a comment
It seems odd to me that when we learn something, we also have to learn the same thing in a different context. Transference of learning is complicated and often involves a regression in skill. Take handwriting for example. When learning cursive, a student with nice printed handwriting often takes a step or two backward in legibility. Once the basics are picked up, the legibility quickly returns. The same might happen when learning calligraphy.
The same thing happens with social interactions and technology. Learning to be polite in the classroom doesn’t necessarily transfer to the playground or the cafeteria. Learning how to behave in a movie theater doesn’t necessarily transfer to a ride in the car. Learning how to navigate through a file system on a computer doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to navigate through a web site. As technology changes, previous learning is no guarantee of future understanding.
Take the example of a reporter in Colorado who decided it would be a good idea to use Twitter to cover a funeral as it happened. Now I doubt that the reporter would ever have considered using a cell phone to call in the story as it happened, but the result would have been about the same in this setting. The task set before us is not easy. How do you help someone, student or fellow teacher, learn from the mistakes they’ve already made instead of repeating them? Is there a role for technology to play to facilitate this learning transfer, or does technology just complicate things by providing additional contexts?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/13/colorado-newspaper-twitters-three-year-olds-funeral/
Lamination September 6, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion.add a comment
The start of the school year brings with it many preparations. Setting up a room is important to set the stage for the learning environment. Schools in my district are very particular about presentation and spend much time and effort talking about and reviewing what goes into the look of a classroom. As I look at the walls, I’m noticing a trend. Maybe it is a good one, maybe not. More of the material, like word walls, seems to be used more than once. The work is ongoing and applicable to the learning each day.
It wasn’t that long ago that knowledge was permanent. Once up on the walls, information was not expected to change. Up go the letters of the alphabet, and up they stay, all year long, whether we still need them or not. Better yet, laminate those letters so they can be reused every year because the information they represent is static, it doesn’t and shouldn’t change. Of course, that is not always the case. With the overwhelming amount of information available to us and our students, sometimes what we need to focus on isn’t just the information, but what we do with it. Can we trust what we read? Can we verify it? Can we apply it to something new?
In a world where the immediate often pushes out the important, and in schools where the inertia of previous learning methods almost always wins, maybe we should be taking more time to step back and ask ourselves what is it that we are doing that is worth laminating? How much of what goes on in a classroom is worthy of making permanent and bringing back year after year? How much of what we do should go up on the walls while we need it, and then is taken down to be replaced by something more immediate? I don’t have any final answers, but the questions seem worth asking.
DoodleBuzz September 6, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.add a comment
I love mashups. There is something fascinating about taking what others have created and making something new and unexpected out of it. Take DoodleBuzz for example. Lots of places search news stories, even those that let you search for specific ideas. This one lets you draw or doodle your news searches. My early attempts are messy and difficult to read, but if you take this idea and apply it to a touch surface, you might get some interesting results.
How Many Of You Are There? September 4, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Tools.add a comment
I’m sitting in on a session about Pageflakes, and one of the side trips we took was to a site that compares your name with everyone in the USA to let you know how many others have the same name. I’m sure you could use this in a Math class to generate data for graphing. Or in writing, you could check to see how common a character name is. You do need to agree that you are 13 or older, so please don’t use this with younger kids.
According to this site, there are 3 people who share my first and last name.
| HowManyOfMe.com | ||
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Technology Dependency August 28, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Opinion.add a comment
The other day a computer glitch delayed flights across the country. It is nearly impossible for commercial planes to function in an technology environment from a century ago. If the technology infrastructure isn’t in place, planes don’t fly. What does this have to do with education? Not much. Schools open, teachers teach, and learners learn whether the technology infrastructure is up or not. If you needed additional evidence that education is behind the times and not taking advantage of the potential of technology, all you had to do was try to catch a flight last Tuesday. Of course, if schools in the US ever do get caught up, we’ll have to prepare for the eventual ‘learning delays’ caused by technology dependency.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10026301-93.html
Police Scanners August 26, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Tools.add a comment
I just experienced another sense of how connected we all are. I need a word for that. Kind of like deja vu, but with an aspect of epiphany. Let me know if you come up with one. Wired published an article that links to a web site that is streaming the Denver Police radio scanner. I guess there is some sort of convention going on that makes this of interest to people outside of Colorado. Makes me think of an audio back-channel to the city around me.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/democratic-conv.html
http://co.scanamerica.us/index.php?county=Denver
Kindle for Kids August 25, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Fair Use, Hardware.add a comment
The Tech Observer, among others, is reporting that Amazon is hinting to investors that they may introduce a Kindle for the textbook market. I am not convinced about the long term viability of the Kindle as an e-book reader, however, based on the three people I know who have one, they all love it, warts and all. I can also see how it would make sense for text books to be loaded onto a Kindle. Students would gladly trade in their hefty texts for a single device that contained all of their course reading.
The Kindle is only one direction. Give every student a laptop, or let them use their own if they have one, and provide digital content is another option. Of course, file sharing and copyrights become an even more important issue for the book publishers if all of the material was available in digital format. This sort of reminds me of the transition from vinyl to compact disk way back when I worked in a record store in the mid 80’s. Short-sidedness on the part of the recording industry hasn’t done them any favors. We’ll have to wait and see what happens to the text book publishing industry as the world rapidly goes digital around them.
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/the-tech-observer/2008/08/25/rumored-textbook-plans-for-kindle
No More Auto-posting Delicious August 25, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Link Collections, Tools.add a comment
I’ve decided to discontinue auto-posting my del.icio.us link as a blog post. I know, it is now just delicious.com, but my fingers refuse to leave out the punctuation marks. Besides, the old address provided a great opportunity to talk about domain names. Anyway, the daily posts from delicious seem to clutter up the blog, and this way I also remove the fall back position of not blogging because I saved another link that day. No more excuses. You can always follow my links through the RSS feed: feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/mwoolums or just adding me to your network.
By the way, here are a few more to track while you are at it.
- Lucy Gray, also known as elemenous: http://delicious.com/elemenous
- Silvia Tolisano, also known as langwitches: http://delicious.com/langwitches
- Vicki Davis, also known as the Cool Cat Teacher: http://delicious.com/brightideasguru
- Vicki Davis, while not a del.icio.us account, she also moderates the educator group in diigo, another social bookmarking site: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/educators
- Larry Ferlazzo, while this isn’t a social bookmarking site, he is one of the best collectors of educational links you can find: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/
Word Frequency August 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.1 comment so far
Another interesting site came up today that tracks word usage frequency. More than 86,000 words are tracked in order of how often they are used in the English language. The data comes from the British National Corpus®, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. The most frequently used word? ‘The’. Least used? ‘Conquistador’. Who knew? Where do your favorite words stack up? ‘Education’ is number 337, ‘Technology’ is number 843, ‘Books’ came in at 764, while ‘Book’ is number 357. ‘Blog’, ‘Wiki’, and ‘Podcast’ are not currently in the list. ‘Twitter‘ shows up, but I’m guessing that is not referring to the micro-blogging tool.
http://www.wordcount.org/main.php
Remember When? August 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Humor.add a comment
Just in case you were getting nostalgic for your old school days, what with the start of a new school year and all, along comes a funny site that lets you start with a picture of yourself and shows you what you might have looked like in a year book picture. You can choose any year from 1950 to 2000 in two year increments. Here is a small gallery of myself in different decades. Having attended high school in the 70’s, those pictures were just too painful to publish here. Maybe you’ll look better back then than I do. I did?
1958
1988
1996
Light Switch August 12, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions, Opinion, Tools.1 comment so far
I’m sitting in on a Google Docs session. Great collaboration potential with Google Docs, but like most technology, there is a catch. In this case, it looks like only one person can actually edit the document at one time. The videos all seem to show more than one person typing at the same time, but in practice, only one person is able to edit the document at a time. Pair writing would be a more accurate description than tandem writing. One person edits, saves, and then the next can contribute. This is still the same document, just not synchronous for more than one editor. Technology has a lot of potential, and Google Docs is just one example, but I still think technology needs to be simpler and more reliable. There isn’t much question about how to use a light switch. Flip the switch to turn the lights on or off. When classroom technology is that simple, we won’t wonder how to use it, because it will be obvious and ubiquitous.
Running with Scissors August 11, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Conference Sessions, Tools.add a comment
This morning I’m jumping in to demonstrate Web 2.0 to a group of teachers. This is a fascinating subject with lots of potential directions. Blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking. What would you include as Web 2.0 for teachers?
links for 2008-08-04 [delicious.com] August 4, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Link Collections.add a comment
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Interesting way to see your bookmarked linked pages in del.icio.us.
