Academic Musings & Tech for e-Learning

Jeopardy PowerPoint Game Update

2007-11-16T05:58:00.000-05:00

Finally, I have had the chance to update my PowerPoint Jeopardy Game template for downloading. This new version is contained in just one file, with both regular and double jeopardy game. Since PowerPoint XP, or 2003, embeds the sound files, it is not necessary to download the sound files separately!

Click here to visit the d ownload page.

The old version will still be available if you are using older versions of MS Office and want the sound effects.

Edit the master slides to customize it for your school or class. It's easy to do through the formatting menu. Check out the tutorials on the webpage for more help. If you use it, why not email me with your Q&A's to share with others.

Need a testimonial? I got this lovely email from Jane in August:

Hi Lynne,
My name is Jane Spieker and I used your template for the First Aid "final" for the Scouts in my son's Boy Scout Troop. The boys really enjoyed playing, and the activity made the meeting fun for all. I also teach Urology to R.N's in the Operating Room at the Hospital that I work at and I'm going to use the Jeapordy format as a learning tool as well.
I just can't thank-you enough for making education fun. Yours is the best template. I also really appreciate the tutorial.

Sincerely,
Jane Spieker

It's really wonderful to hear from someone who's using my work - Thank You Jane for writing - and that's what it is here for! Back to my studies... lots of deadlines to meet ... working on my masters degree in instructional technology at NYIT!

Best,

Lynne Marie

http://www.lynnembailey.com/

http://www.presentsbydesign.com/

http://www.funmasters.biz/

Engineering School has 40% Female Students!

2007-09-30T13:57:00.000-04:00

I was just browsing through the NY Times online and came across this article about Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The school opened in 2002 and it teaches Engineering in a non-traditional way: they used Project Based Learning and an interdisciplinary approach to learning. The small, tuition-free college is attracting a lot of buzz and making a mark as a new "Ivy" league school. Under the direction of Lawrence W. Milas, the president of the foundation, college President Richard K. Miller created a school that seeks to educate a different breed of engineer - entreprenuerial, ethically minded and collaboratively trained in he humanities as well as technology- to think critically, and boldly. Miller, on his President's Message web page puts it this way, : "Olin will always be bold, innovative, flexible, and creative -- just like the students we have attracted. Our curriculum emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach, teamwork, hands-on design, business, creativity and communication."

The article also noted that 40% of its student are GIRLS, a high percentage for an engineering school. The Class of 2011 consists of 79 new students (34 women and 45 men). So yes, this is a very small school, but it has some very BIG ideas. Perhaps if more universities adopted such an approach, they would attract increasing numbers of engineering students, and a greater number of women to a male-dominated profession.

Re-engineering Engineering
The Hands-On Approach: Building a different breed of engineer at Olin College. 'In an era when software matters more than steel, Olin College wants to produce technologists with soul.'

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: September 30, 2007 NY Times Magazine Section

"WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it's usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back - and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer."

Read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?ex=1348891200&en=6c28466b3eb78d2f&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Dining Out Math Lesson Plan

2007-09-24T16:07:00.000-04:00

Last week I had the pleasure and honor to conduct a guest math lesson at the Arturo Schomberg Bronx facility of Satellite Academy High School. [You can also read more about the Satellite Academies here. Shawn Welcome is the Principal.] The lesson I created is called "Dining Out" and this idea can work well particularly well with older students in a consumer math, personal finance, and/or basic algebra review class. The primary activity involves ordering dinner from a menu and getting as close to $50, without going over, including sales tax & gratuities.

Some envision a curriculum around the topic of EveryDay Math. With my personal experience and background in finance (I worked on Wall Street for a number of years, as a Mortgage Office after that and for a financial planning firm), I really know a lot about this and it is one of those things I really like teaching. Too often our students graduate high school knowing nothing about credit cards, bank accounts or budgeting. There are all kinds of financial decisions we make - from picking a cell phone plan to furnishing an apartment - and a class like this can give students a real jump on dealing successfully with these situations.

At The Young Women's Leadership School in East Harlem, NY I taught a similar class, and I really enjoyed the students and their engagement with the subject matter. There were equations, too, of course, but it all fit into Math in Every Day life. The school has a computer lab & mobile laptop carts that can be used, too. Students can learn to use a spreadsheet program, research investments, and tap into an online Mathematical Skills plan to practice and create their portfolios. Dan Stein, college professor and consultant, has developed a spreadsheet that students can use to track their progress and link directly to AAAMath.com for topic reviews and practice.

I published the lesson on the web using google pages and used a calculator widget from Lab Pixies. Widgets are great... and this one cames in handy! Lab Pixies has something new call "moodgets".... I'm sure you'll be seeing this one on myspace ... and it could be great to use with little kids when learning about expressions and feelings..

For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

Blogging Basics

2007-09-24T14:20:00.000-04:00

Last week I attended a Blogging Basics workshop given by Nelly Yusupova, the President of the NYC Chapter of Webgrrrls. Nelly did a fabulous job presenting the information and there was a lively, diverse and interesting group of participants.

On Thursday, October 25, 2007 there will be another blog workshop on designing and implementing a blog. You can register for the workshop here. Consider joining Webgrrls while you're at it. Webgrrls is a great resource for anyone interested in tech-related issues and meeting interesting people with very diverse backgrounds in many fields. There are monthly meetings and lots of opportunities for networking.

Blogging can be a bit confusing for the uninitiated. I wrote a paper, A Look at Blogging in December, 2006 about blogging with ideas for using it in the classroom. You can download it here (it's a PDF file for Adobe Acrobat) and check it out. Using blogs for students to post and comment can be very beneficial for learning, and teachers and administrators find them to be a great communications tool.

For more teaching ideas, lesson plans and articles, see my Portfolio page at LynneMBailey.com.

2007-06-17T23:58:00.000-04:00

Animal Farm: Napolean Trading Card

2007-06-17T23:50:00.001-04:00

In one of my clases this summer at NYIT, the professor Susan Silverman created a group at www.flickr.com. You can find our group at this link. This past week we have been using Flickr and some Internet applications. There are a wealth of tools available to use in conjunction with Flickr (or other images), and these little apps are called 'toys."

In my lesson plan I used Trading Card Maker from http://www.bighugelabs.com/ for depicting and describing a character from Animal Farm.

It's pretty easy to use most of these tools, and a lot of them can easily be used in the classroom at almost any grade level. Stop on over and check out the lesson plans we've developed!

Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/ for face painting and body art

Weekly Reflection: The Importance of Labels

2007-06-11T02:15:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, while doing some reading for class, I thought to myself, who cares what the difference is between Constructivist and Constructionism theories of education? 'Tis far more important to simply engage in it in a real sort of way, than to banter about distinctions between the theory of it, and the application of it. But labels are indeed important, and in the info world, it's called tagging. Tags are just labels to make it easier to find data.

This week I had a look at another TED presentation, which shows an application prototype using Seadragon and Photosynth. Seadragon is a computing environment that lets you interact with a vast amount of visual data in a multi-resolution experience - An amazing tool to work with visual data, it allows for a multi-resolution experience (like zooming in and out effortlessly). Photosynth marries the capabilities of Seadragon and computer vision research by Noas Navely (sp?) In this extraordinary application, images gathered from multiple sources are arranged spatially and converted to panoramic views and much more.

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo."

Watching this demo, which used images gathered from http://www.flickr.com/, drove home an important point about the importance of metadata and tagging, or labelling data, that we publish to the web. It just makes it so much easier to share data if you make it searchable, and tagging is one way to assure that. He does talk about the tapping into the social web universe, using data from users worldwide, creating a "cross-user social experience". It creates hyperlinks between image collections from all users, linking to the information about each image, thereby making for a richer experience.So don't forget to tag those pictures you upload to flickr!

And just think about how you can use this technology in the classroom. Linking images and text, to make a visual potpourri of available resources, can provide a much richer database of related information, for any topic. In order for such a collaborative learning atmosphere to flourish, data of all kinds has to have an efficient way of being found. By tagging our posts, files, images, audio, etc., to the main idea, we are helping to build a world wide index that can add to the human experience and knowledge base.

Lynne M Bailey
teaching portfolio: http://www.lynnembailey.com/
studio portfolio: http://www.presentsbydesign.com/
http://www.funmasters.biz/

Blog Roll Went Down :(

2007-04-09T21:40:00.000-04:00

It seems that great service offered at www.blogrolling.com went down for a while.. maybe they're getting more traffic than they're set up for? Does anyone know of any other services that help automate blog rolls? It would be good to know if there are some others out there.. it was out for six hours, I'd say.. but happily it is back.. it is truly a time-saver!
Lynne

Get Out & Play! PodCampNYC Report

2007-04-09T10:05:00.000-04:00

What a Great Day! Though I must say, I thought it would be more crowded. I actually ran into a couple of people I know: Sarah McPherson one of my NYIT professors, and Webgrrls I nternational NYC chapter leader Nelly Yusupova. YOU SHOULD JOIN! I did meet some interesting people, volunteered for 'watching the computer' for an hour, and attended some great sessions. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the after party-ing at Slate. Aside from Podcasting, there were blogging sessions, too, which I was most interested in . I also learned how to use WordPress to support multiple bloggers to a hosted website from one of the participants - I think it was Eric Skiff from clipmarks.com (great tool for clipping parts of web pages and saving/sharing them) who offered a solution for that.

I attended 5 different sessions -

Amy Domestico of blogTalkRadio led an information session on using about BlogTalkRadio to host your own Internet radio podcast, live! Of course it does get archived for later listening. What a fabulous service.. you can hook up to 7 different people via phone (other tools coming.. including community groups) for a podcast panel, broadcast it live.. this could be very useful for...
Wayne Turmel, host of The Cranky Middle Manager Show who led a session on 'Creating a Read Podcast Brand' He told his story about growing his podcast audience. He is now featured as a writer on a British website. Interestingly, when he polled his readers listeners they most often expressed an interest in being able to connect with each other (enter BlogTalkRadio). Which brings us to ...
CC Chapman on the New Media Playground talking about - how we connect in this read/write /record/listen web world. Twitter this! Very friendly, very connected - he even has an island on second life, that virtual reality world site that I haven't explored yet. I will get to that when the semester is over. There are lots of 'adults' there, too. Chris drove home the point that we each have a unique voice and others are interested in sharing with us.. so Go out and Play! .. blog, find other blogs, make comments, get connected!
Valerie Luther of Creative Concepts talked about using blogging for business. Her company created a very successful blogging, marketing strategy for Biglow Tea and she discussed the process of growing that. It's making a significant difference for the company. Valerie's company is hosting a onference on May 15 2007, BusinessSmartTools, in Stamford Connecticut. She is a very engaging speaker and I am sure the conference will be worthwhile.
More marketing ideas from Chris Penn of Edvisors, who was very knowledgeable about the blogosphere and podcasting, spoke fast, and reinforced much of what other had to say. I am a member of Linked-In, and Chris had contacted me there before the conference. He does a DAILY podcast & blog at Financial Aid Podcast, primarily tuning into the college-student market and categories on Podcast, PodCamp, Focus on Financial Aid, Podsafe Music, Scholarship Update, Mailbag, and Politics .

There were some great vendors, too. My personal faves: magnify.net lets you create your own video channel.. this is one to watch! Many thanks to NY:MIEG (Media Information Exchange Group) and Imprint Alliance Group for those handy carry bags with handels! and to Talk Radio Comedy Podcast - Anything but Monday Show (abmshow.com) for gum in catchy little match boxes (such as.. No, No, You ShutUp! and You Have a Great Ass). I didn't see Mark Gura, but I did see Dr. Kathy King from Podcasts for Teachers of Fordham's Center for Professional Development. You should listen! Podango is a podcast station - just tune into a channel of interest - let someone else do the searching - lots of other tools, too. Another podcast worth mentioning here is On Digital Media, a podcast all about e-media. You can find them at www.odmcast.com. New technologies present very accessible live interaction solutions .. in addition to BlogTalk Radio, interactivity is the impetus for PodGlo, CrowdAbout and TalkShoe.

I was very impressed with the organic nature of the event and the presenters. They had great experiences to relay and excellent ideas. Someone I missed was Laura Allen, co-founder of 15secondpitch.com. If you are doing any kind of marketing, this looks like a great tool and you can share your pitch from their site. The event itself was organized very 'organically,' - they used wikis and blogs throughout the website which made it a simple process to register, volunteer, add events, and resources and they will be updating the site.

It's time to get serious about blogging and connectingvia the web with new people. How? comment, link, technorati, stumble upon (and don't forget to stumble upon your own site), maybe twitter, linked-in, ning. Poke around. I've found lots of useful tools by reading other's blog.. like this one-click blogroll tool from blogrolling.com .. what a great timesaver! Investing time, takes time, ... and over the next few weeks I won't have too much to spare. - school work, trip to Arizona and working may keep me away for awhile!
PodCampNYC was a wonderful experience... and people are busy organizing them in other cities.

For some pics, try this link to a flicker search. Check out the NYC Podcamp Wiki for resources .. which are minimal right now, but hopefully many will be added soon. Did you attend PodCampNYC - what did you find most interesting?

The BIG question for teacher, is how do we use these tools and resources in the classroom for learning. Many are using blogs, but the social network phenomena is frowned upon. You might want to connect your students in a Ning network .. or encourage online portfolio development. What are your thoughts?

All the Best,

Lynne
teaching portfolio at lynnembailey.com
studio portfolio at PresentsByDesign.com
body art/face painting at FunMasters.biz

podcampnyc, podcasting, podcast for teahers, blogging tips, blog rolling, internet brand building, amy domestico, blogtalkradio, wayne turmel, cranky middle manager, cc-chapman, valerie luther, creative concepts, chris penn, edvisors, eric skiff, clipmarks, financial aid podcast, blogrolling, sara mcpherson, nyit, nelly yusupova, webgrrls, bigelow tea, lynne bailey.

Open Educational Resources: OER

2007-04-06T07:40:00.000-04:00

You may have read that MIT has made all their courses available online .. and so have many other institutions .. and they are searchable at www.oercommons.org. ISKME (The Institute for Study of Knowledge Management in Education) has created this new learning portal with more than 8,000 digital classroom materials from top university faculty available free of charge. But it's not just a higher ed resource, K-12 materials are available, too. They have aggregated a lot of course here and there are also some other searching resources for technology resources and news that you can use. I'm sure they will continue to expand and look for additional contributors.

Open Education Resources, or OER, offer new ways to engage with free-to-use learning content.

Users can create their own portfolios of materials. " With a free membership, you can add tags, ratings, reviews, comments and favorites to your own portfolio. You can also post to discussion, blog and wiki areas and see how others are using OER."

PodCamp NYC

2007-03-29T17:35:00.000-04:00

Coming next weekend at the NewYorker Hotel is PODCAMPNYC. Looks like this will be a very dynamic place to be Saturday April 7th. They've changed venue twice to accommodate everyone who has signed up to attend. It's free and you can sign up to, at www.Podcampnyc.org. The organizers have done a terrific job. The website is full of wiki pages and blogs to provide for very organic, grass roots changes. Do you want to do a demo or a workshop? sign yourself right up on the web site.

Now its at "The New Yorker Hotel (481 8th Avenue at 34th St)
Click here to get details on a PodCamp NYC discount for those staying at The New Yorker hotel. The Friday and Saturday night gatherings are still at Slate (54 West 21st Street) Register now or read 10 Reasons to Attend PodCamp NYC. "

NASA World Wind: Zooming in on Earth

2007-03-10T06:32:00.000-05:00

I was at a Region 10 (NYCDOE) Technology Liaison workshop on Friday and we were introduced to this terrific open source program. It's lot like Google Earth on steroids! On the left is a screenshot of Mt. St. Helens from the 3d application and a visual of Maximum Temperatures. From their site:

"World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara." Go to the website: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/index.html

What's so special? It is truly amazing. Historical data, data is updated every 24-72 hours, layers you can turn off and on that show political boundaries, weather events, pollutants, place names, fires/smoke events from volcanos, all kinds of things. There's even a Lewis & Clark expedition layer with links to a website. People can create their own layers, too, with a little xml programming. Some layers get you close enough to see the cars on the Golden Gate Bridge. There is an abundance of educational opportunities here from all disciplines. All teachers should check this out.

Free Software

2007-03-10T05:43:00.000-05:00

For PC users: www.giveawayoftheday.com is a site you should check daily. There's also a sister site, http://game.giveawayoftheday.com . Everyday they give away one software title - free. You must download and INSTALL the software that day. The titles change at 3 AM ET. Now, there will often be software that you will never use, didn't know you needed, or you may already have something similar. But, you never know when they will have something of value for you. In my last post, I talk about FlashSpring Pro.. a $199 program that was the giveaway a couple of days ago - great value to me. The daily giveaway is for software that you would otherwise have to pay for.

I've got the feed on the sidebar here. Check it out.

Since this post is about free software, let me add a few more sites here. www.tucows.com has been around for at least a decade. It's got a great search engine and lots of downloads for freeware, shareware, demos and other software, for both PC and MACs. Another aggregator is http://www.simtel.net/ . GNU - http://www.gnu.org/ - is all about FREE SOFTWARE.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Project. For a directory of software by categories, go to http://directory.fsf.org/. Here you will find links for some popular freeware like Audacity (audio editor), GIMP (photo editing) and Celestia (visual simulation of Space). Google has some of their own, like Picasa for simple photo editing (http://pack.google.com/intl/en/product_info.html?picasa), and Google Earth (http://pack.google.com/intl/en/product_info.html?earth) .

PowerPoint to Flash Converter

2007-03-10T04:46:00.000-05:00

www.giveawayoftheday.com offers a different software application every day for free on that day only. This week I hit the jackpot with FlashSpring Pro 2.0 - it converts PowerPoint Presentations to Flash!

I was starting to research this kind of software and there is was FOR FREE!! (It's $199 and $120 with Education discount.) Read all about it here.

How did it work.. ALMOST perfectly.. I was able to convert my USA MOVIE to a flash file. This software solved 2 problems for me. 1) PowerPoint doesn't embed MP3 files and this does. and 2)It makes the file non-editable (protected). I had to alter the transition timings to compensate for the conversion lags.. but for simpler presentations, it was flawless. You can watch my USA People & Places movie to see the results. There's another (shorter, no sound) presentation here. This is a much better solution than zipping up your presentation with your audio files. The user doesn't have to download anything (assuming he/she has Flash player installed - and almost everyone does).

What it DOESN'T do.. convert your internal links :( if they are on a Master Slide (and so many are)You're presentation has to be linear. There are other converters on the market - some are a lot more expensive. (Maybe one of these preserves internal links? Will have to research later on.) Anyway, this one works pretty well if you ever need one. There's an upgrade coming soon that WILL convert links on masters slides! It's expected next month.

Educational discounts are available - see FAQ for details on company website - 40% off.

My Other Career: Face Painting!

2007-02-28T06:14:00.000-05:00

Or... Body Art.. as we like to call it. For the past couple of years I have occasionally got in on the act with my friends Rainbow Heart (Rainbeau Heart) and Echo to do some face painting, after some training, of course. It's not as easy as it looks! There's also Compassionate, Jewel, Starla and a few others that work with Rainbeau, too. Hmmm... I need a stage name! That's me on the left, in my princess costume, for the Easter party at Tavern on the Green in 2006.

Rainbeau Heart is the Grand FunMaster - he's been embellishing faces and other body parts with paint, glitter and rhinestones for twenty years and the business is called FunMasters. In fact, I just got the website going, www.funmasters.biz .

Here's a slide show of some of his work:

Visual Literacy

2007-02-28T05:37:00.000-05:00

If you have any interest at all in how we represent things visually, you just much check out this link fro visual literacy.org. It's amazing how they have analyzed and categorized the many ways data and concepts are illustrated, charted and graphed! http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html is the web page. The site also offers training and insights. Mindmaps, cycling, flowcharts, clustering, venn diagrams, radar charts, organization charts, turkey box plots and plenty more you may have never heard of are presented in the form of a Periodic Table. What's really terrific is that examples of each type are displayed as you mouse over the table.

PowerPoint for Teachers

2006-12-22T06:34:00.000-05:00

Jeopardy Game Template !

I just redid my web pages at www.lynnembailey.com with a new page, PowerPoint for Teachers. You can download my Jeopardy Game Template to use with your classes. You will have to customize the template for your school, subject and grade. There are tutorials to assist you. Perhaps your students can help write the answers & questions.

Send me your Q&A's and I'll post them on my website. Hope you have fun using it.

Need a Web Page? Some Free Online Page Building and Hosting Resources

2006-11-22T01:50:00.000-05:00

I recently discovered that Google has webpages in beta. It's in the Google Labs section, not ready for prime time, but if you have a Google gmail account, you can start trying it out. I've started using it to see how it works. My page is here: http://teacherlynneb.googlepages.com . It's template driven.

Another site I started fooling around with is http://www.wikispaces.com . I may use this for publishing a webquest. It's worth exploring if you can use a wiki engine for your classes. My page is here, https://technoed.wikispaces.com/, but it's just holding a holding place right not. They have been offering ad-free wikis for teachers.

BTW, if you are loooking to create a webquest, http://www.webquest.org now has a creation and hosting site at http://webquest.org/questgarden/author. It's free at the moment, but they expect to charge a nominal fee in the future.

Most Internet surfers are aware of social networks, like myspace. com and such where they can build personal pages. Geocities has been around or for awhile http://www.geocities.com and is now a part of Yahoo's services. This is not a social network site, but has free and fee site hosting. Another site that offers free web page space and hosting is http://www.bravenet.net . You can use templates here, OR upload your own pages!! and they have lots of add-ons you can include in your pages.

Teachers should also see if using http://www.think.com , the Orcacle sponsored website, might work for them. Teachers can register classes and students can build 10-page websites. There are opportunities here for networking with students around the world in a much 'safer' environment than sconex or myspace.

Blogs can be worthwhile , too. This new version of blogger, now owned by Google, is one of the more popular blogging sites. What's most notably new here is access acontrol and comment moderation. Read all about it at http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=9084 .

For the very ambitious among us, www.moodle.org has a package for hosting online classes. It's open source, and you've got to use your own hosting service.

What websites do you know of that offer free (or VERY cheap) space generally, or for teachers specifically? Do they use templates or can you upload your own pages using FTP?

Comment & Questions re Wineburg Reading

2006-11-22T00:34:00.000-05:00

"Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" Introduction and Chapter 1 from Wineburg. Available online at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm

In reading this article, 2 cliches came to mind. The first one was about being doomed to repeating mistakes. "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (George Santayana). The second was that you cannot know someone without walking a mile in their shoes.

Why, indeed do we teach history? To ask this question, is to open up a debate on why we do or do not teach other subjects as well. Education has many purposes. My own perspective is that society's primary goal in educating our children is to prepare them to be successful adults. That success can be defined in a number of ways. How can the study of history benefit students most? How can the study of history benefit society most?
Mr. Wineburg posits that studying history "holds the potential, only partially realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum." The study of literature also holds this potential, as does the history and literature of any discipline. But in order to truly walk in someone else's shoes, we must abandon the ease of applying our own present and experiences onto another person's experience." Can we really do this?

It is difficult enough to walk in someone else's shoes who we know in the present, let alone the past. But by attempting to do so, we do gain the historical perspective and understanding of our membership in the human race and it's limitations. In books and film we can and are often and easily drawn into another's life and time. Indeed, some movies seem to quite expertly convey historic context and character development in the framework of that historical moment. Thinking back on a couple of films I saw in the past year, I found that some of them were especially interesting from a sociological perspective. Good Luck and Good Night, a story about William R. Murrow and the 'McCarthy era' was one such movie. The movie chronicled events and captured a period of recent US history that was eerily familiar. The details of the setting, what the corporate workplace was like in the 1950's, the concerns of the players, the societal impact of a single television broadcast, the delicate balance of popular opinion, righteous indignity, saving one's own proverbial ass, financing (advertisers), and protecting the livelihood of those close to you, gave new life to this slice of time and allowed viewers a unique glimpse of what it was like to actually be there.

Wineburg quotes Collingsworth, "all history is the history of thought," and Ginzburg, that historians must "destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they come from societies very different from our own." From Robert Darnton, he offers us that "Other people are other. They do not think the way we do. The more we discover about these people's mental universes, the more we should be shocked." All of this is true.

The study of history must also provide facts: names, dates, places, actions. This gives us a framework for further investigation. Why did they act that way? How did they communicate? What were they thinking? What facts did they have, or not have? How did they live? Why didn't they do this or that? What would we do in their place? Obviously, exact history does not repeat itself, but many analogies can be found. Can the study of history help us as individuals to navigate today's world? What is it about the past that we really need to learn?

Wineburg also writes that, "The relevance of the past may lie precisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance." We do have a lot in common with all of our ancestors. We are sentient, we have feelings. The vignettes the author told were quite interesting. The daily trivia of everyday life may seem irrelevant, but for each one of us, it reflects the nature of our times. The story of A Midwife's Tale may contain abundant trivialities, but it is precisely those trivialities that connect us to each other. If this person lived fifty years later she probably would not have been a midwife - maybe she would have been a nurse, maybe she would been a seamstress. The point is that she had a life befitting her times, she lived, loved, worked, ate, slept, communicated, consumed, learned, traveled, thought, acted in accordance with her beliefs and within societal norms of the time. Through her journals one can, in fact, time travel to a community that is "so foreign, and yet so similar to own."

Biologically speaking, man has changed little. We are no smarter than men of 5,000 years ago, we just have more knowledge available. On the most basic level, feelings are what we have in common with every generation. Fear, love, belonging, estrangement; desire for power, knowledge, wealth, trying to create a life that provides us with necessities, food and shelter, first and foremost, then to satisfy other needs and desires. This does not change over time. How we accomplish these things does change, however. "To be or not to be" is not the question; the question really is, how to be. History gives us many examples and analogies to draw upon.

The argument about which history to teach, though not the topic of this article, does place an inescapable bias upon us. One of my friend says, "we teach history so that people are completely brainwashed as to where our society came from, where it is and where it is going. Teaching history, using standardized text books, is an opportunity to rewrite history in the way our government wants us to perceive it. We can see history being rewritten in our daily newspapers. So how easy is it to rewrite history of the distant past where there are no surviving witnesses?" Is this why society teaches history? The government funds public education, it is in its own best interest to promulgate the culture it deems most acceptable.

I found this quote most interesting, and, perhaps most aligned with my own thinking:
Gerda Lerner:
"What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.

"We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events."

A couple of other quotes I found interesting:
George Bernard Shaw: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
George Wilhelm Hegel: What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.

These last two quotes have, alas, too much truth in them. Wineburg mentions Woodrow Wilson and his committee which decreed that the study of history can "achieve its highest aim by endowing us with the invaluable mental power which we call judgment." Is this possible? Perhaps it is. But I have to agree with Wineburg, that historical study can, and should help us to achieve "the understanding that each of us is more than the handful of labels ascribed to us at birth," that it "teaches us the limitations of our brief sojourn on the planet and to take membership in the entire human race."

New Literacies vs. Old Literacies

2006-10-23T19:46:00.000-04:00

Course: Instructional Applications of the Internet
Comment on Leu & Leu's description of New Literacies (http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~djleu/fourth/one.html)

Leu and Leu's list of new literacies reads very much like a list of old literacies. They are 1) Identify important questions, 2) Navigate complex information networks to locate data, 3) Critically evaluate that information, 4) Synthesize data to address questions and 5) Communicate answers to others. There is nothing really new here. These literacies do not exclude reading, writing and math, nor do they exclude technology. Their list could apply to any time and place, and should apply to EVERY time and place. After all, what is technology? It's just TOOLS. It's one of those abilities that separate us from other living things on this planet. Other species use natural resources as tools, but only mankind invents new ones. Our modern era really began with our nascent ability to create and control electricity, and has been accelerating ever since then.

Today's digital technologies are just another step in the evolution of that technology. Common education technologies in use are textbooks, blackboards, whiteboards, chalk, markers, pens, pencils, papers, rulers, protractors, and more recently, calculators, projectors, television programming, and other videos. Educators are just catching up to new technologies that have been in the workplace for years, and embracing Internet technologies to help bring these innovations into classrooms. There has been enormous advancement in the area of communication. These technologies are the easiest to understand and incorporate into education. Some are so prevalent and easy that many students learn to use them before their teachers.

How is the Course Document on this section different from Leu Leu? Does the new literacy build on the traditional literacy? Is something new happening or is it just "hype"?

Leu and Leu's Internet site is very useful for identifying teaching and learning resources. What's missing, however, is a direct set of technology standards. New literacy most definitely builds on traditional concepts of literacy. As society continues to grow, information builds exponentially. Traditional concepts of literacy were never more important that they are now. Everyone has to deal with the infinite bombardment of communications through a variety of mediums. The ability to locate (quickly), sort, arrange, evaluate and use information appropriately and effectively requires traditional literacies as well as the ability to use electronic tools.

If reading, writing, and arithmetic are the old core literacies, what are the new modes of communication, expression, computation, data analysis, visual representation, information searching? Give this topic some thought and come up with your own list of new literacies.

The NCREL and Metiri Group, http://www.ncrel.org/engauge/skills/skills.htm, are closer to the mark in organizing new literacy skills into four categories: 1) Digital-age literacy, 2) Inventive thinking, 3) High productivity, and 4) Effective communication. Their standard skill set encompasses both new and traditional literacies. David Warlick's list, http://www.scholastic.com/administrator/marapr05/articles.asp?article=newlit, also embraces both new and old literacies with his list of what students should be able to do: 1) Expose knowledge (including searching, evaluating, organizing and understanding that knowledge), 2) Employ information represented numerically, 3) Express ideas compellingly, and 4) Use ethical judgment regarding accuracy and ownership of information.

But I think that we need to look at technology standards separately. NYC/NETS technology standards for students are grouped into six areas (NETS also has a list of technology standards for teachers and academic administrators):
1) Basic operations and concepts (understand nature and operation of technology systems and use proficiently),
2) Social, ethical and human issues (understand these issues as they relate to technology, use technology responsibly),
3) Technology productivity tools (use technology tools for learning, creative endeavors, collaboration, and production of creative works),
4) Technology communication tools (use tools and a various media and formats to collaborate, publish, and interact effectively with multiple audiences)
5) Technology research tools (to locate, evaluate, collect, process data and report results)
6) Technology problem-solving and decision making tools (use technology to solve problems, make informed decision and to develop strategies for doing so).

Only the first two standards apply solely to technology. The remaining standards simply expand the toolset we already use to research, communicate, produce, evaluate, analyze and solve problems. As these tools become more and more commonplace we cannot ignore them, but must embrace them. Today's education must include learning how to use these tools, and should also expand our understanding of systems to include technology systems and the impact these systems have on us and our society.

New literacies, to me, are digital literacies. Technology trends include the continued computerization of systems and digitization of information, together with continued convergences of systems and miniaturization (not only functional, but leading to expanded storage capabilities). I see the new literacies in education divided among four functional categories.
1) Teachers (and all staff) using technology to prepare, manage, and perform administrative functions
2) Teachers using technology to educate and present information,
3) Students using technology in learning activities, and
4) Assessment and reflection, or evaluation.

What tools do we need to know how to use to perform most effectively in a digital environment? What tools do students need to learn how to use to most effectively locate, produce, share, evaluate, and apply information? Specific answers will surely change over time. We all need to be able to identify the right tool for the job at hand, and use resources are accessible to us. Do we need to use a spreadsheet, a word processor, a database manager, or presentation software? If we don't know how to use these tools, can we learn how to use them with what we already know? If you do not know how to use HTML to construct a web page, you can now use Internet applications that help you do it. They all have similar tools - learn one and you can mostly likely use another. The same logic applies to word processors, spreadsheets, presentation, publishing, recording, accounting, browser and search engine applications.

I think that teachers and students alike are well equipped for using most of the latest communication tools that are available. It's not hard to learn to send an email, to attach a document or to create a blog, a wiki, or an instant message. It isn't even difficult to create a podcast or a webpage; there are Internet sites that make web tools available for you do this. You do need, however, to be aware of these technologies and find best practices for using it in the classroom.

There are skills, however, that are not so easy to master, and supporting skills which the NYC DOE would like us to ignore. To use digital tools most effectively, students need to learn to use the keyboard effectively. [While I am sure that speech recognition software will someday advance to the point of making this less of a necessity, that day still seems far away - and you may not always be in a situation where you can talk out loud.] Most of us use word processing software, but not many of use it particularly well; the same can be said for other software packages. At some point, the tools of the day need to be learned and taught in the classroom, as well used for preparation, administrative and management functions. Today those tools commonly include Microsoft Office applications in addition to Internet searching. All students graduating today should have experience using these programs, and preferably training in how to use them correctly. They should also understand basic technology terminology and systems.

As with every other subject, a digital technology curriculum can be taught in a spiraling fashion. Let's take MS Word. Once you know how to open the program, you can start keying in words and use it. Unless you used a typewriter once upon a time, you probably won't even be surprised that word wrapping occurs automatically. You learn to save the document, to delete things, use the enter key to create spaces, change the colors and fonts. You find out how to use the help feature. At some point you learn how to input headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes and access and use the templates. You make tables, you insert pictures, learn how to copy and paste and reformat information from other sources. You learn how to control line spacing, create section breaks, and eventually, you learn how to properly format long documents and to use styles (which is something that should be learned sooner, rather than later). You might also learn to use the table of contents and indexing features. Not everyone needs to know all these functions, but everyone should be aware of their availability. In addition to having the ability to perform research and communication functions, students should graduate with the ability to write letters and reports using a word processor effectively.

Students should also know how to enter information into Excel and generate a graph, as well as how to create an effective business presentation in PowerPoint, including writing effective bullet points. Is it important that they need to know how to make a video? I can't say, though most jobs don't require it. It is however, a great interdisciplinary tool. Learning any software program well, will, however, provide connections to using other software. I personally have no idea of how to use X-Box or PlayStation, but most of my students do. Their knowledge of games and communication programs can be leveraged to other productivity tools. And fortunately, programmers are constantly refining software application to make them more user-friendly all the time.

To accomplish most of these things, traditional literacies cannot be ignored. The ability to read, write and think logically is paramount. It obviously takes time and money for technology tools to infiltrate all strata of academia, but it is inevitable. It's part and parcel of our society. Learning standards have to expand, not only to include these tools, but to understand technology concepts as well.

Tech & Soc St: Using Tech in Class

2006-10-23T19:34:00.000-04:00

from
Monday, October 2, 2006
Tech & SS: How I Used Technology in Class
Tech and Social Studies class assignment: BLOG - Write a paragraph, or so, in your blog about how you have used (or heard of someone using) technology to successfully support the learning and teaching of skills and/or content.

As a technology teacher with students in a room full of computers, it was difficult NOT to use technology in my classes. I often began class with a DONOW that called upon students to open an ongoing word document and complete the DONOW task. The purpose of the task was two-fold. First, it gave the students a bit more keyboarding experience, and second, it provided either a review of something previously covered, or a taste of the day's topic. Using an LCD projector, the DO NOW was displayed in the front of the classroom, and I also provided printouts of the material. A typical DO NOW required students to type a paragraph that summed up some previously learned information and there would be blanks that they would have to fill in, or sentences to complete for them to explain something we did in class. There was a limited amount of time provided for this assignment, and more text than most students could type in 5-10 minutes, but we would review the entire text at the end of the DO NOW period.