(I did something to “enhance” my computer and my audio is balking.  I will continue to try that but I will post my thoughts here.

1. Share your thoughts about Web 2.0 and 21st Century learners. Do you believe the world is changing for our students? Do teachers (and schools) need to consider and address these “shifts?” How can we teach students to be responsible, effective users of these tools? One of my favorite exercises with my students is to ask them if George Washington walked into our classroom, what would he recognize.  At first, they say that he wouldn’t recognize anything.  As they think about it more, they realize, while they wouldn’t recognize a computer or printer or calculator or cell phone or any of the other technological wonders, he would certainly recognize the schol, the students and the teacher.  He could still read books and, when shown a computer, be able to read everything its information.  While many things have changed, we have to remember that the relationships between students, and between students and teachers has not changed.  We need to learn to help the students find their own way through the ever changing maze of technologies and the plethora of information available.  I still believe that the basic responsibilities of learning haven’t changed.  It’s  just the tools that have changed.  As adults, we tend to become quite defensive and uneasy when learning new things.  Many of us are afraid that we will break something.  When I was a kid, Hollywood portrayed computers as devices that would explode if given too much information (and, often, a spring would pop out.  Where the spring came from, I have no clue.)  Perhaps that image is still ingrained in our minds.  As we tell our students, it is OK to fail.  The worst thing that will happen is that whatever we are doing won’t work.  Once teachers are more comfortable and stop fearing the spring, they will more easily embrace the technology.
   
2. While I know there have been challenges along the way, I hope there have also been discoveries made, and ideas sprouted for each of you. Please share the “top” one or two tools, concepts, ideas or resources from the course that you felt were most valuable for you in your classroom or professional role. What was valuable about them? Are there any tools, ideas or resources you have begun using, or plan to use in the future? What was the best discovery?

• I went into this class with a very poor attitude.  I teach math and decided that none of this made much sense for me.  I am fairly techno-savvy and I figured that I knew everything that I needed to know.  While I still agree that many of the tasks covered in this class don’t make sense for my class, there is a place for things that I never had considered.  Rather than get a plain homework grade, my students will be required to post weekly summaries of what we learned in class onto our class blog or wiki.  I am anxious to get started with them but our student email isn’t working yet so their invitations are still sitting in their inboxes.  In addition, rather than playing a review game that I have created, students will be required to create a game for the class.  They love math jeopardy but I HATE creating it.  I think that they will like working in groups of 3 to create the game and then lead the class in playing the game.  My attitude has greatly improved.
• I found information and tools for unexpected tasks.  In the past, my yearbook students have spent a lot of time looking for the perfect picture to illustrate a theme.  I was always troubled about copyrights.  Already this year, I have sent them to Creative Commons to find photos and they have already received permission to use them.  I am not sure that we will but we are developing a library of pictures and other graphics that we are free to use with no worry about copyright infringement.  I had never every thought of this possibility.
• Teacher networking sites have been disappointing to me.  I often find other teachers who ask the same questions as I do but I seldom find answers.  I am an engineer by training.  Engineers want to answer any question posed, often just to show off.  Usually a good answer can be found within the fluff.  The teachers seem much more reserved in answering questions.
• One interesting side note is that taking this class required that I repair and update programs and links on my computer that were outdated.  I tend to get lazy.  My computer still runs XP and I hadn’t updated Flash and other addons in a long time.  I know that I need to upgrade to Windows 7 but, I am…lazy.  Except for voicethread, it seems to be working.
• I think that one of the foci of education in the future will not be trying to find information as it was for me but learning to filter the plethora of information that is available.  My middle schoolers gather more and more information about anything.  Teaching them to practice smart filtering will be the challenge for any teacher.

This was actually a lot of fun and I learned a lot.  I am glad I took this over the summer.

One of my goals for my math class is to create a library of step-by-step procedure to solve problems found in the book or examples that I do in class.  Many times, the steps are clear to students  in class but become opaque as the day wears on.  I believe that if I could provide the audio and the student has his/her class notes, it will become clearer.

For this exercise, I decided not to do a math problem.  Instead, I told one of the stories that my students really like for me to tell in class.  I am a storyteller by nature and they can always push me to tell “just one more story.”  Here is one of their favorites, The Story of Lawn Chair Larry.”   I told this to one of my science classes about the importance of learning everything about your experiment before you do it.  They really liked the story especially when I acted out the TWA pilots radioing air traffic control about a guy in a lawn chair.   Of course, my facial expressions and wild hand gestures probably help.

I spent a long time looking through  Classroom 2.0.  I searched for posts about some of the things I am currently working on, especially scheduling.  I found that there were many people asking questions that I have.  Unfortunately, most of those questions had no useful responses.  Many had posts saying something to the effect of “Oh yes.  I have that question, too.”  Not too helpful…   I signed up to get emails if responses are posted.  It could be a valuable resource if there was true dialogue.  I know that some topics have good discussions, just not the topics I searched.

Social networking is a great tool.  However, in its current form, I don’t think that it would be useful to me  in the classroom for a number of reasons.

1. Our school blocks all social networking sites.  That would put a damper on things.
2. The students can’t use their cell phones during the day so they can’t get to those sites that way.
3. Sites like facebook require a breakdown in the separation between teacher and student.  I don’t want my students reading things I post even though they are perfectly acceptable.  They know me well but I still want to keep some distance. I refuse requests from current students.  I will only accept the request when they have graduated.
4. I read and listened to information about Twitter in education.  I am not convinced.  I feels as if we are waiting for someone to say something profound.  The benefit from using Twitter in my classroom are outweighed by the difficulties I see.

I am certain that the classroom in five years will be equipped with devices that support social networks or whatever replaces them in our society.  I just don’t think that we are there yet to be using Twitter in the classroom.  Personally, I am not someone who enjoys hearing snippets of others’ lives, personal or professional.  Just as I was not a fan of wikis, I am sure that these thoughts will change, too.

Pageflakes proved to me much more of a challenge than I had anticipated.  I had serious Firefox trouble that I still haven’t figured out.  However, it works on my laptop so I will stick with this for now.  I changed my theme to…baseball.  I am not sure if I like the boxes but I could grow to ignore it.  I searched for flakes and found that many didn’t work. There were RSS feeds that connected to the wrong place, flakes that seemed blank that I couldn’t enlarge and a multitude of error messages.  I am sure that, with some work, I could figure it all out.  However, I like the concept of putting everything in one place.  I am guilty of having too many tabs open at any one time.  If I had a portal with everything I commonly use, I might be able to clean up my browser.  I keep windows open so that can easily access sites.  This would help me.  I looked for a moonphase flake but didn’t find one.  I found a moon phase RSS feed but it just brought up the text and not an image.  Clicking on the text brought up the image.  But I would prefer to see the image.

This would be interesting to use.  However, knowing me,  I might spend more time setting it up rather than using it.

I spent quite a bit of time flitting between articles. Since my mind is on polls, I spent some time on the articles about creating polls. The author amended his original post with a plug for micropoll.  The list includes a number of the polling sites that we had in thing 14.  I need to find a good polling tool that allows me to accept large amount of text.  As I explained in Thing 20, Google Forms doesn’t cut it for long input.  I will work on that this week because I know that my time to poll our eighth graders will come faster than I can imagine.

I have a great deal of experience using Google Docs.  Here are some things I have used:

1. I am in charge of creating our Middle School schedule.  Classes that occur only once per day really drive the schedule.  I created a google form for our students to select their first, second and third choices for electives.  Here is the incoming sixth grade form (I know that it says elective 2 twice).
   • Timestamp
   • Your name
   • Elective choice 1
   • Elective choice 2
   • Elective choice 3

   To get the data, I just open the spreadsheet and I have the columns

   I can then sort by names, elective, date, etc.  It makes my life much easier.

2. Our school is currently up for reaccreditation.  I created a google spreadsheet of all of the documents that I needed.  I shared this will the members of the administration and others who have these documents.  When someone locates a document that I need, he or she opens the spreadsheet and enters her or his name.  That way, I know what I have and where to get it as well as what I still need. As long as all of the administrators are willing to use this, it would be the height of collaboration, not to mention, paper saving. Unfortunately, most of them printed the spreadsheet. Oh well.
3. Every year, our yearbook features our eighth graders.  I creates a form asking for short answers and some longer answers.  Unfortunately, the longer answers caused me great grief.  Instead of text, I used paragraph text.  I believe that it still has some bugs because it truncated the form.  I tried putting those questions as the end but it still prematurely truncated the form.  I gave up but I would love to figure out what happened.

YouTube

I could spend a lot of time on YouTube.  My biggest problem is that my sons love to make videos.  Of course, I watch them all.  In fact, my oldest son won the 2006 Georgia Digital Video Editing contest.  His brothers plan to follow suit.  Most of the videos that I watch are for fun.  So, of course, I have to embed his winning video here

Just so we don’t get the idea that his talents lie in this area, he has a lot of really ridiculous videos posted, too.  Somehow, I always seem to be in the background of these videos.

Then I searched for how-to videos.  Since we just came back from vacation at the beach, I tried some how to boogie board videos.  They really were just videos of people showing off their kids’ boogie boarding skills.  But then I found this one.  One advantage of swimming on the southern Atlantic ocean is that we usually don’t need wetsuits (unless you are one of my sisters-in-law).  I learned some new things.  I guess it makes sense to tether the board to your upper arm.  I usually tether it at my wrist.  In retrospect, that is not a good idea.
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Finally, I searched from some videos on math.  I like to teach factoring a quadratic when a <> 1 using factoring by grouping.  The first video I found was extraordinarily dull.  It was sheet after sheet of equations and the instructor droned on.  I am convinced that if I spoke to my students that way, they would doze off.  The next video was similar.  I am not sure why anyone would post these videos.  The…speaker…speaks…as…if…he…was…telling…you…that…you…need…a…root…canal.  I am sure that there are others and I will continue to look.  I liked the bodyboarding video much better.

TeacherTube

I tried looking for the factoring by grouping video on TeacherTube.  Its search engine didn’t like me particularly and gave me random videos.  One under factoring by grouping was a video entitled Goodbye, Nicky.  I am sure that the farewells to Nicky are heartfelt but it is not factoring by grouping.  So I looked for something that seemed interesting.  I found this video about how not to give a PowerPoint presentation.  It should be required viewing for anyone who is going to give a presentation.

QuietTube

I agree that getting just the video is probably a very good thing to do.  To test this out, I used a silly video my son made of our bird bobbing his head.  Here is the bare video. Ok, so it is not award winning.

My first thought about podcasting in education is how wonderful it would be to create a podcast of each lesson.  In an ideal world (in which I teach only one course, I have no other responsibilities, my children are perfect and require no supervision, my car runs flawlessly and never has a check engine light on, etc.) I could create a podcast of each class meeting and make it available to my students that day.  An absent student could quickly and easily learn what happened in class.  With work, this would be a great way to put the observer/listener exactly where he/she usually is during class.  Editing could be the real sticking point here because it would be difficult to go straight from the class to the web with no editing out of irrelevant material.

I have to be careful when I subscribe.  I tend to subscribe to everything that looks interesting.  Instead, I was very careful.  I subscribed to 2 eye-in-the-night-sky podcast so, when someone asks me what planet/star is high in the sky, I can check to make sure that I am right.  Although it sounds odd, this happens quite a lot to me.  (I am not sure why…)   One is issued  nightly so it just contained snippets of information with a lot of pr for other websites, etc.  I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at unless I listened to a lot.  I subscribed to another one that is monthly.  It was full of information but it is much longer.  I will keep looking.  I also subscribed to several teaching algebra podcasts.   I didn’t find these very interesting.  I will continue to look for better ones.

My one issue is that I do not want to use iTunes.  I use a Zen mp3 player because I listen to a lot of audio books.  My Zen lets me set bookmarks.  Equally as importantly, it is compatible with library services that require Media Player.  I installed iTunes but my firewall is giving me trouble.  So I listened to these through my Zen instead.

When we renovated our house, I insisted that we put in a library.  I love books.  I should be sleeping but I was having so much fun finding my favorite books.  In the process, I downloaded two books to my Kindle (I have run out of shelf space).

I created an account and merrily added books to my library.  That was a lot of fun.  I only have 21 books but I will go back tomorrow.

The sad part of this is that my kids don’t like to read.  Regardless of how their “screen” entertainment was controlled when they were young, they gravitate to it.  Their argument is that reading a book takes too long.  In the time that it would take to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, they say that they could watch all of the movies.  They don’t share my excitement about the pleasure of reading.  It is a chore to them.

My delicious account is drlhertz.  I really should use this more.  I keep so many tabs open in my browser that it is dizzying.  Of coruse, my kids don’t want to use my computer because they have to fight their way through all of the tabs.  I really should save the links and get rid of some of the windows.

When I first searched around, I looked for algebra concepts, especially factoring by grouping.  There were a huge number of sites already tagged.  Then I thought of my real problem, helping my students create a theme for our yearbook.  I searched around for yearbook and yearbook theme and bookmarked about 8 sites.  I will actually read them and send my students to read them, too.  The link I tagged to k12learning20 was my favorite photo of the earth-moon system.  One thing that I found were a number of dead links. I guess that is hard to avoid.

I tried subscription for Orioles.  It is quite an interesting collection.

I have set a goal of clearing out my tabs by the end of July.