Be Prepared!

Technology in all its forms have fascinated me since I was a child. I am thrilled that the opensource and DIY technologies are not just surviving, they are thriving. I love to see what wonderful possibilities and opportunities are available to teachers, parents and students in this vast World Of Electrons.

Conversations continue on the topic of DIY vs corporate, packaged simulacrums of what is available online....imitation copies that corporations convince administrators and technology directors will be "just as good" as what a teacher and class can create themselves. I strongly disagree.

A twitter colleague, @garageflowers, just cited a blog post on this topic, I Guess I'm Still a Punk.

After reading this blog post, I had to share my comments to the author, @glassbeed, with my readers. Mostly, they relate to a basic tenet of teaching, about being prepared to stand up for what you believe. If you want to support DIY technology, I believe you should be prepared to describe, design and defend it.

Yes, I agree. This was a great post. I love DIY technology, and I have worked diligently to document and explain how teachers can use it effectively in their classes or with students.

I was just thinking about your post when I went to my blog to capture my url and saw that WeatherPixie is down. This is a prime example of the downside of DIY technology. Teachers must prepare for the positive, as well as negative aspects of DIY technology in their classes.

WeatherPixie has been a pivotal widget for teachers and students. The developer of WeatherPixie is not the problem, but the company who owns the server that supports her website had a fire. This was a problem that she couldn't help, but it highlights a problem that tech directors and administrators can cite to keep teachers from using these free online tools. Teachers must be prepared.

Another concern associated with opensource products and online tools is that they are ephemeral. They may be here today and gone tomorrow, for any number of legitimate reasons. That makes it difficult for teachers to really go to the wall arguing for the use of this technology. They must be prepared.

I am saying use this developing technology, but a teacher must be VERY agile and have backup plans in case tools aren't available. Also, teachers should decide how they will console students if their projects are lost. They must be prepared.

It is great to be a DIY tech person, but you have to be prepared;D

Making the Rounds

Well, I made the rounds again today! No, I am not a doctor, a manager or a farmer. I am a teacher.

In the World of Matter, I live in Kansas, the first Land of Oz. At various times, I make a special effort to find teachers who also live in Kansas and use technology of all sorts.

This may just be me, but I find it is easier to find teachers on the other side of Earth, who have similar interests, than those living in my state. What has your experience been?

To find like-minded people, I look in the places where I live in the World of Electrons, for instance: Twitter, del.icio.us, Classroom2.0, TappedIn, and Diigo. Today, I found five people, living in Kansas, who teach and use technology. Some are not in the classroom each day, but they all have their roots in education. They also meet the use of technology criteria.

Why do I do this? I made this search part of my professional development plan. I want to help end teacher isolation in my state... in my lifetime. I hear about teachers in other states and countries meeting new area teachers and forming expansive collaborations in the World of Matter and Electrons. I think that is wonderful. What do you think?

To join with other Kansas teachers, to collaborate and share our past, present and future experiences would be a wonderful personal and professional goal to acheive. Kansas teachers have various opportunities to collaborate through area educational networks, yet they don't use them...even when they join.

How do you find like minded teachers in your state, region, or province in the World of Electrons?

Lives of Teachers: Public or Private?

This is my response to an excellent discussion, by Andy Losik, a fellow educator/blogger, on his blog, HCS Geektopia. Below, I have quoted a portion of his posting that relates to problems some teachers have with online content that they have used, developed and placed in their profiles, websites, blogs and other online media.

If you don't think people are really looking at your Facebook pages or Googling you, think again. Here is a blog post from talk show radio host Kim Komando instructing parents how to find all kinds of information about YOU!

A tv station in Arizona ran a November sweeps piece on what they found on Arizona teachers' social network pages. "Teachers Expose Private Lives" dug up all kinds on new hires across the state, told where and what they teach, and tried to confront many on air.

Unfortunately for some teachers, the damage was done a long time ago. People post stuff or make crazy decisions and end up paying for them every time a perspective employer runs their name through a search engine. That stuff just doesn't go away.

You have expanded on a critically important topic that can affect the lives of many teachers.

Having a teen who interacts online, along with myself, I have had some strange experiences that lead me to believe that we may have more to worry about than monitoring our own behavior.

There is a dangerous trend among spammers and SEO's of ill repute to hijack websites, profile pages and public pages of social networking sites such as twitter, jaiku and others.

A few of my friends found our tweets online with different names, and these were part of a dating service. One of my friends was so aghast that she made her tweets private, shared the information with her colleagues and gave some suggestions to combat these thieves. I am of the opinion that might deter some, but not the hard core identity thieves.

My take home story is that we need to educate our leaders, including administrators and parents, not to jump to conclusions without verification and appropriate safeguards (including hearings) for teachers or we will end up with a witch hunt on our hands in a time when we need good teachers.

Through appropriate education on this topic, communities can aggree on standards and determine which teachers are trying their best to do right. We can learn to root out cases of identity theft, overcome a social faux pas and weed out the teachers with real social/emotional issues.

Thanks for carrying on this valuable conversation;D

Cast Your Web2.0 - Vote: Webware 100

One of the most exciting aspects of the interactive internet, is the basic premise that the web2.0 experience is distinctive. Your voice can count, and you don't have to be a great guru of tech to express your viewpoints, preferences and evaluations.



Last night, a contact from my Jaiku group reminded us that it was time to vote in the Webware 100 competition. I did. When you vote, you get a small badge for your website which is a symbiotic assistant.

When you display the Webware 100 Voting badge, you are accomplishing some important goals for yourself, the Webware100 team and CNET. One, it shows the people that you are interested in that you are interested in what web2.0 applications are still around tomorrow. Two, it reminds your readers that they should vote for their favorite web2.0 applications. Three, it helps the Webware100 team get the world out that evaluation and review are continuing.

This type of review combines the expertise of the professional and the amateur;D I think this symbiosis helps all of us, because it is one more tool in our web2.0 toolbox that we can use to sort through the various applications that may be of service to us, personally and in groups. I may be an amateur, but I know what works for me. CNET may be the expert in reviewing all that is tech, but they need to know what we, the consumer, thinks of these web application.

So, instead of thinking of myself as an amateur, professional or semi-professional, I like to think that we are all important characters in this online ecosystem of web applications and social interactions.

Go VOTE! Support your most cherished webware.

Voki, OK!

Voki, Oki, Oki, Oy! When the producers of Voki discovered this name, they were on to something engaging. The web application is cool, the name is cool and the ways you can use it are cool. Voki is very cool.

My first experience with Voki was on a profile page of one of my Classroom 2.0 colleagues, Jonelle. I was smitten. The realistic avatars, backgrounds and presentation box were so appealing that I had to find out about Voki.

Students are also enticed by Voki, even mature, sophisticates (young adults) have engaged Voki. They use it to tell about themselves, to share information about their school and to practice their online, interactive skills in a protected environment.

Since Voki is a widget, a web application, it stands alone. While you do sign up for Voki, you don't have to interact within a community to benefit from this application. I have seen Voki avatars in a variety of online places, including profiles, blogs, wikis and webspaces. Any of these places can provide students a protected environment where they can experiment and develop educational online experiences.

One aspect of Voki that can be interactive is the comment section of the Voki box, so students can respond to a Voki presentation, just as they might comment on a blog. While commenting or making their first Voki, students don't have to use their own voices. Voki has a text to talk mechanism with a choice of several accents and voices of both genders. I use the Kate voice who has a slight British accent, and I consider it most effective.

Earlier, I wrote a blogpost explaining how to accomplish a action research based evaluation of Voki, as used by students called, "Welcome to My Web!", Said the Spider to the Fly, included Voki and Weather Widget in a blogpost. The purpose of this first post included evaluating web based, online applications, so I reviewed Voki as soon as I started using it.

Recently, I decided to make another review of Voki, because I believe this widget has met critical mass among those teachers using online, web applications with their students. In one day, I found Voki on the majority of the new websites, blogs and wikis that I visited among a group of teachers planning an online educational conference. That is above and beyond all of my colleagues on various educational networks who are using Voki extensively.

Documenting this rise in the use of Voki, I made several searches, some were general search engines and the social bookmarking network, favored by teachers, del.icio.us. If there are other networks or search engines that I could use in the future, please let me know;D Here are some of the results:

*del.icio.us There were a total of 139 SEPARATE bookmarks for VOKI. Within those bookmarks, more than 5,000 users had also selected this combination of 139 bookmarks.

*google.com A total of 33,000 website references contained this search string: Voki, education, school. Amazing!

*yahoo.com More than 40,000 urls contained the same three tags: Voki, education, school. There are thousands more because I noticed that all tags of Voki in Classroom 2.0 were clustered in one search result, so that is probably the same situation in all the educational network searches.

*adonomics.com A Facebook analysis and developer services has many compare/contrast analyses. This one is comparing Voki to Meez.

References to Voki can be found in Digg and Ask.com, so it seems the point is proven that Voki has reached critical mass for educational use around the world. Have fun and learn with Voki;D

BTW: I find it very exciting to see the expression of the promise of a particular widget that I know has great educational potential. There are specific educational activities and projects that Voki can enable or enhance, and that is a blogpost all in itself.

When Quality Counts, n2teaching sez: Be TappedIn

What is my professional and personal perspective of TappedIn? How did I discover Tapped In, the most enduring of all the high quality educational social networks?

I have always thought of myself as a gleaner who shares with my family, friends and community. That is why I enjoy working with teachers and students. I gather curriculum, materials and other necessaries to share with my friends and students. TappedIn is the quality place for me to join my gleaning and sharing activities for one purpose. I can glean and share ideas, techniques, research and experiences with other members of the TappedIn community in my office, private chat and in meetings around the TappedIn campus.

Having taught, at various levels of education, for many decades, my professional and personal identity continues to evolve…adapt or die. I find this online iteration of my professional life is very satisfying, and I want to thank the TappedIn community for their help in this ongoing process.

Frequently, I invite others that I know to join TappedIn also, and I really enjoy that quality experience. It is like being Johnny Appleseed to those online who are interested in education, children and camaraderie.

Call it synchronicity, serendipity or a discrepant event. I am always amazed at how wonderful it was that I found the TappedIn community. I discovered TappedIn, during the winter of 2004, while looking for information about researchers and educators working in the area of projects. This was before the NEW buzz phrase, project based learning and then problem based learning, became ubiquitous.

I was looking for research by Art Costa and information about his work. I knew some of his work had been published by Skylight, so I included Skylight in my search string. I couldn’t find them (they no longer exist in their previous form). I did find references to SRI, so I followed those links, and they led me to TappedIn. As Professor Peabody always told Sherman in The Fractured Fairy Tales, “…and the rest is history”.

After joining TappedIn on January 18, 2005, I started my life in this quality educational community by looking around the campus….checking out my new home. It was pretty overwhelming, but exciting. I continued to look around to, to be a sightseer. Since those heady early days, I learned that a more commonly used term is “lurking”, but that word has such a negative image. I like to think that my TappedIn visits were more like excursions around the virtual city. In some ways, I was a tourist.

On my first excursions to TappedIn, I would examine the map of the campus and the monthly calendar. From the calendar, I found information about the various groups and their activities. I also really liked the emails that I was receiving. The scheduling and information provided gave me confidence to go to TappedIn to follow up on the topic of the email or newsletter. As time went on, I finally made a critical mass of experiences, so I no longer felt that I wanted to be an onlooker.

As those travelers before me, I discovered the TappedIn Reception Room. At first, I didn’t even know what I wanted to know, but BJ Berquist asked me some questions, including, “Had I been to my office?”

Well, I didn’t even know I had an office, but I thought having an office was a great idea. Then I learned the most important stuff, how to meet and greet other people. I love the info icon.

Over the years, I have developed my office, although it still is not up to par. It is open, and I invite you to visit anytime. Also, I have enjoyed developing good working relationships with many other education professionals and lovers of learning at TappedIn.

Between Jeff Cooper, David Weksler and BJ, I really made great learning gains over the past year. Jeff knows so much about the ways of the internet, and his instruction is always on point. While David knows lots about technology, I really appreciate his support knowledge of how to best use technology to teach science and math. BJ always seems to know how to ask the right question, and she is always full of confidence in the human capacity. I have come to know people who live in other countries and other circumstances, and that has been most inspiring.

For teachers, parents, students and other interested people, I believe that TappedIn is the best first choice for a quality community experience. This past spring, I joined the HelpDesk. It seems that there are always visitors, and sometimes I can help. The TI Festival was another fantastic community experience, and I learned so much that I am still sorting through all the information.

My next adventure with TappedIn is to start a professional development group, and I am working on that as we speak.

Having grown up on college campuses across the United States, especially in the South and Great Plains, I really relate my TappedIn experience to those early years. Lots of fun, lots of learning, and lots of inspirational work goes on here at the TappedIn community. People of many different levels of experience and education come together in good company to be together.

The most important reason is personally professional. I appreciate the quality of TappedIn. One of the major needs of educators relates to knowledge overload and the friendship factor. Technology has changed so much since I was young. Our class schedules were given to us on a punch card and the first computer language I really liked was Basic. There are so many more books and materials available for teachers and students, but we still need each other.

No matter where we are in this journey of life, it always seems best when we have great traveling companions. That is what I have found in the online educational community of TappedIn.

7 Steps For Online Class

TappedIN, an educational social network, is sponsored by Stanford Research Institute, Inc. within their Center for Technology in Learning, an innovator in educational research interests, including TappedIN.

Follow
these seven simple steps to discover TappedIN, the online tech campus.
You can have an office and make protected classrooms for K-12 students.
TappedIN is robust and receptive to the educational needs of teachers,
students and tech leaders:

1. Visit TappedIN as a guest. Sign in as a guest. Enable chat.
   


2. After signing in, you will be directed to the Reception Room.


3. You have arrived. Usually, volunteers are available to help...if you want.
   


4. Move your cursor to the bottom of the TappedIN Reception Room and read the Quick orientation to Tapped In.


5. At the top of the webpage, you will see tabs. Click on the Me tab. Read your message.
   


6. Click on the TappedIN tab and visit the campus, people and calendar of events.


7. After that, the "sky's the limit"...read more, join TappedIN, talk online or visit offices.