Oolong the Rabbit

In my search for memes on the internet, I found a website  for Oolong – a rabbit in Japan with an uncanny ability to balance things on his head. Sadly, Oolong has passed away and his owner has a new rabbit learning tricks of the trade, but all of Oolong’s pictures are there for viewing.

Personally, I think students of all ages would love this. Oolong can be seen balancing a pancake, sombero, even a roll of toilet paper, and it’s difficult not to continue to peruse images to see all of them.

This meme offers a great opportunity to stimulate student’s creativity in journaling, creating a story, or writing about a personal experience. In addition, while the site is highly navigatable, it is primarily presented in the Japanese language. This offers students an opportunity to reflect on multicultural themes, as well as usability. What makes Oolong’s images appealing across cultures? What makes a website easy or hard to use, and why? The themes that could be explored are rich and almost limitless.

Cute, odd, multicultural… I can’t think of anything else I could ask for in my meme research!

Georgia Standards for English Language Arts

There have been some changes to the Georgia Department of Education’s website for standards, and I definitely do not like it.

If you go to the website and do a search say, for high school standards, you automatically have to choose grades 9-12, and what you get when that information comes up is – well – a mess. Oi, vey.

To make it worse, you can’t simply limit your search by key word to grade 9 standards, for example, and have only grade 9 standards appear. Instead, you can look at standards by course… and, oh my, it looks like there are only 6 subjects in English taught at the high school level. Given Ms. Cox’s contentious behavior toward scientific standards, there is little surprise that a third of them are biblical. I would apologize for the snark, but as a taxpayer with a vested intrest in education, I take issue with non-scientists meddling with science standards.

Last spring, teachers could go to the website and find standards by grade, which was very useful. What was the DOE thinking?

The site does have a page of resources specifically for teachers, which is nice.  However, the lesson plan template is not immediately available, and it doesn’t come up when you perform a website search.  And, believe it or not, the technology link on the page has “integrating” spelled as “intergrating.”

Sigh.

I’d be willing to bet that Ms. Cox and her office do not have a background in education, because the site was designed without consideration for usability.

Apologies for the diatribe, but this kind of thing makes me angry. Teachers work too hard to be handed a resource that is not only deficient for everyday use, but presents  poorly to the public.

Social Networking for the Classroom – Go or No Go?

We’ve been discussing in class the pros and cons of using social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for academic purposes, and for an exploratory exercise, we were asked to look online for examples of when these tools have been successfully employed in the classroom and when they haven’t.

I like to research, so this assignment was frought with landmines for me… I always find a little something that takes me off of my assigned path, and today was no exception.

What I stumbled across is a 2007 article that discusses software called Elgg – an open-source social engine that, according to the article, was “designed specifically with academic uses in mind.”

I need to explore more about the tool – it has to be hosted and administrated, which implies an undetermined cost of use. Still, if a school could place more control over the social networking environment, it could reduce alot of potential headaches.

This feels a little bit like cheating, but as a protected social networking solution, Elgg addresses both social networking in schools and the issues that arise out of it.

To be truthful, I don’t know if I would implement social networking into my classroom – it’s something to explore during student teaching, as my collaborating teacher is giving me quite a bit of leeway with respect to what I choose to do.  I’d like to wait until I have a better feel for my approach to classroom  managment and the student population that I’m working with. Do all students have access to the internet during school hours, after school hours, or at all? Is technology already a part of the school culture, or would I be implementing something totally new? I certainly wouldn’t implement social networking until I’m certain that a culture of respect is established within the classroom, as I’ve been witness to incidents here at Kennesaw State University on Vista that changed the classroom atmosphere for the worse. In summary, the answer to whether or not I would implement social networking into my classroom is a qualified “it depends.”

Thoughts on Using Wikipedia for Online Research

In my life as a medical writer, I couldn’t live without Wikipedia. Believe me, I’ve tried; there’s something too assessable, casual, and so-not-peer-reviewed about it for me to be entirely comfortable using it to research serious scientific topics. But this is one of times when the old school “tried and true” way of doing things just doesn’t trump “quick and dirty.” I can – and do- cut some corners when I by-pass PubMed, and I no longer feel ashamed.

That’s why I applauded the position of Covitz and Smoot in their article, “Wikipedia: Friend, Not Foe”, in which they champion the use of Wikipedia as a research tool for students. As a teacher, my primary concern would be that students wouldn’t be adept at determining the integrity of the information that they are reading – after all, anyone can post information to Wikipedia. However, this is a prime opportunity for a lesson that all students need: how to determine whether or not a source of information is appropriate for use.

I was always contrary as a child, so I’m going to love teaching this. I can’t remember what age I was when my father told me not to believe everything that I read, but it stuck with me… so well in fact, that it got me thrown out of Sunday school. I question the veracity of most of what I read, and virtually everything I hear. If it’s information that I think I can use, I always - ALWAYS – verify it before accepting it. I’m not going to be the one that looks bad in front of a class, my boss, or my child. And I hate to lose a debate.

All a student needs to know about the information that he or she finds (that is, besides whether or not it is applicable to the topic being researched) is whether or not the information is generated by a reliable source (primary or secondary). To find this out, all the student really has to do is determine where the information comes from.

Wikipedia is nice because often the source of the information posted is cited; after all, most of the pages published are created and monitored by people who are supremely interested (if not experts) in the topics (Crovitz 92). These sources of information are readily verifiable.

Still, there is published information that begs attention, and I will tell students this: if something looks like an opinion instead of a fact, it probably is. And if you find something that looks like a fact and it’s not cited, research that fact to determine it’s integrity. If you can verify that it comes from a reliable source (for example, a newspaper article, a professional journal, etc.), use it. If not, don’t.

Man, I’m going to love this job. Who knows? I may even create a couple of contrary students along the way. I hope I do. We need more people who look for (as opposed to give) the answers in this world.

 

Crovitz, Darren and W. Scott Smoot. “Wikipedia: Friend, Not Foe.” English Journal 98.3 (2009):91-97.

Embedded Media Practice

Just for a lark, I’m going to practice embedding media into my blog using a Twilight theme… okay, it’s not actually for a lark; I just know where to find cool Twilight information and media because my 8-year-old is obsessed with the movie. I’m cheating.

One of the first pages Carlee found is the author’s website. We bookmarked that page because Ms. Meyer uses her name as a part of her URL, and spells her first name (Stephenie) differently than most people with that name (Stephanie). It’s something that’s not easy to remember if you want to get to the website fast.

Carlee is constantly checking YouTube for New Moon videos, like this one:

In truth, I’ve looked at a few of these myself!

Considering Web 2.0

We were asked in our technology class at Kennesaw to consider the implications of Web 2.0 for not only teaching, but for society as a whole. While there’s an infinite number of topics I could write about here, I’m going to start out by saying as I type this, my 8-year-old daughter is sitting on the couch in our living room with a laptop – and yes, she’s on the internet.

I’ll wager to guess that only people over thirty years old can appreciate how huge this is, because that’s the generation for whom a home PC was not the norm during childhood. The technology literally affects the way our brains are wired – the research on this is growing in leaps and bounds – and today’s generation of students not only expect to have access to a home PC, but they expect technology to be everywhere. They have laptops, phones, and other peripheral devices that give them virtually instant access to the world wide web and therefore, to what ever interests them.

This means that a 48-year-old person like me in many ways lives an entirely different existance that the child that I’m raising and the students I’ll teach, even though I have access to the same technology as everyone else. If you think that sounds crazy (some of you younger folks do), I’m going to say… not so much.

Why? I didn’t learn to type until I was well into highschool, and only then because my mother forced me to take a business class for a year. I didn’t lay a hand on a PC until I was 30 years old, and it literally took me 6 months to master the mouse. In contrast, my daughter was using the mouse to play games on the Webkinz site when she was 3 (it took her maybe an hour to get her left and right clicks down), and she used Microsoft Word to write her first short story when she was 7. Her Uncle Mike (bless his heart) sent her a Nintendo DS for Christmas, and I sit back and think she’ll use it to play a couple of games… WRONG. She figured out how to use it to text her friends from school (when she first informed me that she could do that, I thought she was kidding). And she has her own cell phone, with her friends’ phone numbers programmed in (I’m still working on that myself).

I can’t lie – there are days when her ability to pick up technology almost instinctively makes me feel like an idiot. But the issues run deeper than that. As a parent, I’m scared to death. I really don’t have control of her world – what she is able to do, what she is exposed to – the way that my parents’ generation did. I worry about keeping her safe, and I worry about the behaviors that she’s learning from influences that I don’t know about or understand.

As a teacher, I’m going to have to really stretch to comprehend the way my students experience the world. Seriously. I work on the internet all day long as a writer, and I’m fairly technologically savvy for my generation. And yet, it doesn’t bother me to sit through a lecture at college – in fact, it’s kind of comforting to me to sit back with a cup of coffee, let the world slow down, and experience information through the words of a knowledgeable professor. The high school students I’ll deal with this fall probably won’t be able to deal with that. It’s not that they are not disciplined (okay, maybe to some degree it is…), but it’s a zillion light years away from how the world functions for them. I’m going to have to take that into account during lesson planning.

So, there’s this huge generation gap that I’m contending with on multiple levels. There are people my age out there that are successfully earning a living without cell phones, constant internet access, and other technology that is becoming standard in business offices today, but I suspect that we are the last generation that can afford to sit on our haunches while technology advances. This generation certainly can’t. And as the mother of a young child and a teacher, that means that I have to be prepared to embrace technological advancement as well, because I have to prepare the next generation to function in a world that is likely beyond my imagination.

Scary. Exciting. True.

WebMonkey Surveys

Let me start by saying that in my experience, there’s a fine line that determines whether online tools are a godsend or a colossal waste of time. When I test drove SurveyMonkey, my first impression was – honestly – the latter case. The program looked like a VW Bug and was about as much fun to drive. Which can be misleading, because when it comes to software, most of us like things to happen smoothly, quickly, and seamlessly, right? So when I didn’t develop a survey that I liked within 30 minutes, the frustration level began to rise exponentially with each passing minute.

However, I’m a student. And although I might give up on a software program, I rarely give up on a grade. 

So I stuck with it. I silently cursed the pop-up windows that could only be active one at a time. I tried question types one after the other until I found one that naturally fit the question I wanted to ask. And I sighed a “Glory, hallelujah!” when I forwarded the finished product to my classmates for review.

Three people responded. I didn’t get an e-mail notification by SurveyMonkey when that happen – that would have been nice – but when I logged back into the tool the next day, I was able to view a nice summary of results. I could browse individual responses, and the tool captured some customizable information, such as the user IP address, the time the survey was taken, and how the user got to the survey in the first place. All in all, pretty useful stuff. 

The moral of the story is that SurveyMonkey is the kind of tool that will give back exactly what you put into it. If you are in a hurry, unless you’re practiced in throwing together a survey from scratch, the tool may not be your best choice.  

However, if you’re on a budget a budget and have a little time on your hands, you could put together a survey that would be useful for the classroom for several semesters. For example, if I end up teaching in a fairly diverse environment, I could develop a survey that would help me quickly understand my students as individuals – for example, who they are, their comfort level with reading and writing, their familial backgrounds and interests – without meeting with each and every one individually. That constitutes a wealth of information that could vastly improve the effectiveness of my lesson plans, and I could even potentially win friends by sharing the information with other teachers.

In summary, with a little patience and elbow – excuse me, inter-phalangeal joint grease, SurveyMonkey looks like a cost-effective way to connect with students. As a teacher, I’ll use it again!