The Magic of Saving PowerPoints as JPEGs for Collage

One of the greatest challenges with the incorporation of digital technology into the 21st century classroom is how much time it can take to do so. The exploratory, experimental, and collaborative nature or simply the learning curve students need to climb to use tech in an English language arts classroom can be a real threat to delivery and mastery of content. That's why I'm always looking for ways that tech can either save time, deepen learning, or at least come out even with traditional ways of teaching and learning.

One of my best successes in this regard is using PowerPoint for collage.  Especially the 2007 (2008 for Mac) version, PowerPoint can be "a poor man's PhotoShop." The application's editing ribbon boasts oodles of options to reformat text, shapes, and images.  With transparency, reflection, rotation, size, and color you can combine images in ways to create meaningful and poignant ways.  It takes students a class period to play once they find their images, which brings me to the time-saving aspect of PowerPoint for collage.

For such project I ask the students for one slide to be saved not as a PowerPoint, but as a JPEG. (Yes, you can do that!--just click the format option when you Save As, and the application will let you make every slide a separate image.)  To garner copyright-friendly images, they visit Creative Commons Search or Compfight and mark "non-commercial use."  Since both sites offer search engines, they find what they are looking for with method rather than madness.  Instead of searching blindly through magazines for an image that might do, they consider how what they are looking for might be tagged. My 12th graders found the one, two, or three images they needed in the first class period.  A few students did some further searching as homework to find just what they needed.

The particular project for which I used PowerPoint collage last month asked students to identify an instance of magical realism in Laura Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate.  The fantastical, archetypal, and mythical aspects of magical realism called for images that were more likely "created" by collage and combination of images, rather than a singular one simply "found." Students were assigned to quote the line, and represent the instance with image (collage encouraged but not required), and of course, credit the source(s) of images.  Students spent three class periods in total on the project before submitting their JPEGs to me via our class wiki. (A color printer would work for a classroom display, or you could collect them on a flashdrive, but that might take another period.)

Once I had each JPEG file, I spent an evening casting them into one single PowerPoint and then posting to Slideshare. The next day students could view their individual work amid that of their peers to see the combined effect of the many instances of magical realism in the novel. You can see the results here.

Glad that the project showed students a new way to use a familiar technology, I accomplished both some digital as well as traditional literacy lessons in a timely manner. That's real magic!

Let it Snow!

Like many teachers and students in the Mid-Atlantic States, I've been experiencing a week of snow days. After quickly reminding my envious friends that I must make these days up on fairer days, I settle in to catching up on grading papers, replying to student blogs, and prepping for next week's classes.  Then calm.

A chance to think, to mull, to surf, and to read unlike what I had been accustomed to save my salad days of grad school or dog days of summer. Being unable to get out of the house, with two feet of fluff on the ground and a few more inches falling, I'm granted that rarest of commodities--time unscheduled.

Time to be reflective, creative, thoughtful, intellectual, sentimental, and focused.  I'm catching up with the September issue of Educational Leadership and the November issue of English Journal. I'm chairing a curriculum committee on 21st Century Learning Standards and both have periodical have offerings on the topic.

In EL, Terrence Clark's article "21st Century Scholars" tell of a program inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. "The district's high school developed a program that gives students the opportunity to build an impressive electronic portfolio documenting an array of mind-stretching experiences, which take place outside of regular school hours in the afternoon, evening, on weekends, or during vacations."

In EJ, Jim Burke's piece for the English Journal's "From the Secondary Section" column, presents "Reimagining English: The Seven Personae of the Future."  He gives Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future an English teacher's perspective and profiles a lucky seven archetypes for the Millennials in our English courses.  These personae have one common denominator: imagination.  Burke lists:

storyteller, philosopher, historian, anthropollogist, reporter, critic, designer. 

It may seem that some of these are far afield from how we English teachers have thought of our craft. Burke argues:

This is the future we must imagine, the one in which our students will live. These are the personae they will adopt and adapt as society and the workplace evolve. Some will wonder where literature is, where culture can be found in this model. Yet I see our rich tradition of literature and language, rhetoric and composition, prose and poetry already existent in all these roles. It is simply time to reimagine how our discipline might be reenvisioned.  

Even without these personae in mind, many English teachers know that their work has helped students who have gone on to create, innovate, and cope with cultural change.  Now to remain relevant our cultural change Burke joins the chorus of Daniel Pink and Ken Robinson (and many others)  in calling us to make imaginarion, creativity, and collaboration the brain, heart, and soul of our courses.  More on the challenge of this in a future post.

Right now I have some shoveling to do.

iPod Curriculum

First let me say, for those who don’t know me from previous posts, I’m a digital media literacy advocate. I believe that it’s imperative for media literacy and digital skills to be taught in the English Language Arts classrooms, and elsewhere. But I also believe that students must be taught these skills in tandem with traditional literacies of reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and representing. The new media expand these literacies, but first they stand on them.
Without the traditional skills and understandings of basic language arts, digital literacies become just so much pushing buttons, tinkering with software (soon to be updated and outmoded), and presenting the superficial.

I am reminded of Mike Schmoker’s essay “The Crayola Curriculum,” published nearly a decade ago in Education Week. A professional stickler for academic results, Schmoker raises the alarm for classroom activity without learning, products that lack process, and process that lacks rigor.
Technology in education often has the allure of that was once held by the diorama, the poster, and the book jacket project. Nowadays, we see PhotoStories, iMovies, and PowerPoints accepted without anything more critical than “Wow!” “Cool!” and “Neat!” Not only are digitally made projects new and glitzy, they may even beyond the can-do of the teacher, which grants them special but superficial esteem. Add to this the mandate that the teacher-learn-along-with-if-not-from-the-students, and it’s tough to develop best practices, let alone be sure that language arts our being taught and learned at a deep level.

As an advocate for media literacy and digital skills in the English Language Arts classroom, I must constantly remind myself to plan backwards using essential questions, outcomes, and objectives that use technology in service to reading and writing and other traditional literacies. Although digital literacy is part of literacy, the tools of the trade are still thinking and practice, expression and audience. Another factor in the equation is time. Figuring out how much time to teach, which skills, and what is relevant to the curricular unit at hand is key. Sometimes the Crayolas make more sense than the computers.

Students, too, are a strong motivating factor. They love the technology, especially if they can check surf a few of their favorite sites in lieu of staying on task. What teacher doesn’t want to be popular not only with administrators pushing the tech but also with students who gravitate toward the cool teacher that brings out the laptops daily. The question for us professionals is –now as ever--what and how is being taught effectively and efficiently?

Technology has become part and parcel to English Language Arts. Perhaps it’s been that way since stylus and clay, stage and theatron, Gutenberg and moveable type. Today, skills of expression, representation, and reception are multiplying at a blurred pace. Teaching our students the basics is still essential to teaching the latest device, lest our students produce creative and satisfying but mindless and vain Power Points, iMovies and video games, and become casualties of “The iPod Curriculum,” unable to read, write, and think about texts critically.

Image credit: Remix of "Sweet Sweet Phone." By Miss Karen. 10 June 2007 and "Crayola Lineup." By Laffy4k. 26 Feb. 2007. Flickr. Used by permission provided by Creative Commons License: BY.

Respect, Kindess, and Empathy in Social Media

Can social-networking technology actually be social? I've worried, not just about anti-social behavior like bullying and ranting, but about people substituting face-to-face, or ear-to-ear, and hand-in-hand communication. Much is lost in the media.

Will the next generation be burrowed in their own niches, texting in syllables, with only like-minded fbfs--completely incable of geniune social skills?* No tubs of ice cream in this picture.

Yet I saw a glimmer of hope in the words of Himanshu Nigam, chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace. In an article posted by Cnet, Nigam made the following points about the potential of social networking sites to promote certain social behaviors:

Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.

Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.

Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

So with lessons in media literacy can come lessons of social literacy. What an engaging and unsexpected arena to teach caring for ourselves and others! Conversations about fair, just, generous, and kind dealings naturally can be reasoned out as we teach our students how to best interact on the web. Alas, maybe with media can be geniunely social, even if the ice cream must be served separately.

_____________________

*fbfs - Facebook friends

Image credit: "Goat Milk Ice Cream." By Stu Spivak. 29 May 2007. Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons: BY, SA.

A Media Literacy Lesson that Matters

As we teach 21st Century literacies, teaching copyright, copyleft, public domain, and other copyright friendly designations like those from Creative Commons often is met by disbelief if not resistance by the my so-called "digital native" students. (They may be native speakers but their digital literacy sometimes has as many problems as their English grammar!)

In November I noted the Center for Social Media recently release of the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education" which will help teachers and students in the United States navigate copyright in the digital age. Now there's an interesting case at hand.

While working on video projects, my students point to all of the music and image that is being used on YouTube, while I point to the same as copyright infringement.

"But I bought the album, myself" students argues when I question if one got permission to lay down a commerical track, and "that gives you the privilege of playing it for yourself, not re-posting it in a video on the Web" is my response.

"How do you know if a photo is copyrighted if it doesn't say?" another student asks. "Assume it's 'all rights reserved," I remind. "Ask for permission," I coax. "Whenever I've asked for a photo to use in a non-commerical project I've received a "yes." A collective harrumph, says the digital native as he tromps back to Creative Commnons/Flickr.

Having done lessons on propaganda and advertising in the past, I know sometimes it's difficult to find examples from popular culture that students can understand and care about. Enter the Shepard Fairey /Associated Press /Mannie Garcia squabble over the famous and "Hope" poster of Barack Obama's likeness.


The Associated Press has claimed rights over a photo taken by free lance photographer Mannie Garcia and sought damages from Fairey who found inspiration in the photo for the iconic poster. Fairey has peremptorily sued AP citing "Fair Use" protects his work.



The upcoming ruling on this case may affect creative media use of intellectual property in ways important to digital natives (and immigrants) who use artistic content: how we download, remix and upload media in public spaces including the Internet.

National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross presents a synopsis of all sides with fascinating interviews with Shepard and Garcia, a couple of official statements by AP, and commentary by Law Professor Greg Lastowka. All presented in nuggets of audio that can used easily to illuminate the key points and prompt discussion with students about media, artist expression, and copyright. The contemporary hipness and recognizable nature of the Hope poster, the clarity with which Shepard, who started as a skater-street-artist, talks of appropriating images for his graphics, and the implications hanging in the balance for our students and 21st Century media use combine to make this case perfect for students to consider. Thanks to Ms. Gross for her thoughtful, logical line of questions that layout a story's subtleties and nuances.

Obviously this story stands on its own for a lesson on media literacy. Also, it would work in with any study of propaganda--think Animal Farm or 1984. Fairey makes insightful comments on propaganda, the arts, and consumerism throughout. You'll find more of his iconographic street-graphic art at the Obey Giant website, which is a topic of discussion that brings up Orwell as an influence of Fairey's politic.



Image credit: Photo by Mannie Garcia for the Associated Press and Graphic by Shepard Fairey.

Are You Driving the New Model?

The National Council of Teachers of English has an updated Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment that is a clarion call to English educators to embrace and develop skills in digital technology and media. Adroitly the NCTE points out that language changes as the way we communicate changes, and indeed to be a literate person in the coming century requires a new and plastic skill set.

Blurring? Yes. Whereas in medieval times one was literate who could read and write, tomorrow (if not today) one is literate who can read, evaluate, communicate, create messages, develop meaning, and build relationships in myriad, complex, and ever-changing technologically based means.

The NCTE's framework point to such literacy skills as that will allow a 21st Century readers and writers to :

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The charge for English teachers comes in dozens of questions under each of the above elements. Such questions as:

• Do students use technology as a tool for communication, research, and creation of new works
  
• Do students work in groups to create new sources that can’t be created or solved by individuals?


• Do students solve real problems and share results with real audiences?


• Do students create new ideas using knowledge gained?


• Do students evaluate multimedia sources for the effects of visuals, sounds, hyperlinks, and other features on the text’s meaning or emotional impact?


• Do students practice the safe and legal use of technology?

I say these amount to a charge for English teachers, because the lessons that these questions point are still emerging and yet becoming germane to language arts study. What percentage of our curriculum and assessment is answering these questions in the affirmative? Surely, we always have held such lofty goals at times and perhaps those "creative" or "dramatic" or "soulful" among us have from time to time veered off the straight and narrow essay assignment track("why don't you submit that poem to a magazine" and "cite your sources" and "how about creating a collage on theme").

Today is a new day, and tomorrow newer still. Technology as a way to read, create, publish, and communicate is tuning-up the English classroom into an all-terrain vehicle--sans brakes! As teachers we must learn much that's new if are students are to learn from us. The NCTE's framework serves as a good table of contents for this new-fangled buggy's user's manual.

Giddyup!

Image credit: ahisgett. "All Terrain Buggies." 22 Aug. 2007 Flickr. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/hisgett/1203532051/>. Courtesy of the photographer under Creative Commons License: BY.

Mapping English Skills in the New Millennium

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has forged alliances with key national organizations that represent the core academic subjects, including Social Studies, English, Math, Science and Geography. As a result of these collaborations, the Partnership has developed this map to illustrate the intersection between 21st Century Skills and English. The maps will enable educators, administrators and policymakers to gain concrete examples of how 21st Century Skills can be integrated into core subjects.

As this map was announced earlier last week, Kylene Beers, president of the National Council of Teachers of English pointed out that the English map includes interdisciplinary themes, outcomes, and examples from best classroom practices when it comes to integrating 21st Century Skills.

Cross-cultural themes of this curriculum are:

Creativity & Innovation
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
Communication
Collaboration
Information Literacy
Media Literacy
Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy
Flexibility & Adaptability
Initiative & Self-Direction
Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
Productivity & Accountability
Leadership & Responsibility

Very exciting stuff as we see curricular revolution brought on by the contemporary technological advance that determines our disciplines work in tandem and in service to such life skills

At any rate this map will help we educators wrap our minds around what and how 21st Century skills might be best addressed, reassuring to progressive teachers and motivating to ones ready to get up to speed as we head to the first decade milestone of the millennium.

Fair Use Guide for a Digital Age

The Center for Social Media recently released "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education" which will help teachers and students in the United States navigate copyright in the digital age. At the focus is the U.S. Copyright Office's limit on copyright known as "fair use."

This code comes timely. As the "Code" reports, educators have often erred to liberal and conservative definitions, some believing anything used in the classroom was fair game while others believed they'd find police officers ready with handcuffs at their classroom doors if they so much as showed transparency of a magazine ad to their students and thus they "hyper-comply" to imagined rules.

What is are the limits on copyright, so called "fair use"? Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law states "the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered 'fair', such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. It also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

"The distinction between 'fair use' and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."

Still, in the digital age which includes internet publishing of information and the natural inclination to encourage students to produce works for global audiences, the copyright office' definition of "fair use" falls short of clearly delineating what is acceptable and legal.

The "Code" document has been reviewed by five attorneys and endorsed by National Association for Media Literacy Education, Action Coalition for Media Education, National Council of Teachers of English, Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association, and Media Education Foundation.

The process was coordinated by Profs. Renee Hobbs (Media Education Lab, Temple University), Peter Jaszi (ProMedia, American Universitgram on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University) and Patricia Aufderheide (Center for Social Media).

As teachers use the motivation of world-wide audiences for their students' voices by having them use and remix copyrighted material and produce their own copyrighted works (in America copyright is extent at moment of creation) via internet media, it become incumbent that we inform and guide them. The "Code" notes:

"In particular, educators should explore with students the distinction between material that should be licensed, materialthat is in the public domain or otherwise openly available, and copyrighted material that is subject to fair use. The ethical obligation to provide proper attribution alsoshould be examined. And students should be encouraged to understand how their distribution of a work raises other ethical
and social issues, including the privacy of the subjects involved in the media
production."

The "Code" is a sure step for teachers to prepare for such lessons and conversations with their students as consumers and producers of digital media. Get your copy now and school thyself.

Time is of the Essence: "Our Students are Showing Up Tomorrow"

Sir Ken Robinson, author of the must-read Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative and advocate for arts and sciences education that is inclusive, expansive, and collaborative, presents compelling arguments against standardized testing and for programs that encourage creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking.

I met him last week at the Regional Arts Collaborative, held near Pittsburgh. It was delight to meet a man knighted for his leadership of a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK government bringing together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators.

Now living in America, Robinson points out that No Child Left Behind, with its regimen of assessments and funding "amounts to leaving millions of children behind" and kills their creativity, while demoralizing and stigmatizing students, educators, and whole learning communities.

He calls this crisis, "a scandalous misuse of human resources," at a time when we need to encourage performative skills in our children more than ever. When, as Sir Ken notes, "a college degree is not a passport, but a visa" to success in a future that we can't predict,it is absurd that educators and students must contend with standardized testing that narrows curriculum to traditional reading, writing, math and science. These subjects are certainly important, yet with high-stakes testing placing incredible emphasis on children being able to demonstrate knowledge that fits into bubble sheets, we see critical thinking, collaborative skills, technology applications, and aesthetic capabilities being pushed out of curriculum.

Sir Ken notes a waste of the most important resource our unsteady economy needs most--human potential, which can be realized in creative, performative pursuits in the arts and sciences. Furthermore, dichotomy arts and sciences is not only artificial but also--and more dangerous--obsolete in this new century. I agree that such tests do more to limit students abilities and potential for learning, while at the same time have the effect of making school irrelevant to our students.

The emphasis for the sort of education Sir Ken calls for, schooling that involves high level applications authentic work in arts and sciences, and that involves collaboration, creativity, problem solving, performance, would produce a relevance and rigor to develop active intelligence and cognitive development that are missing in our schools and needed for our future.

In good measure time and energy of teachers and students are being misfocused on a very limited skill and knowledge set that won't serve our futures. So call your representative? Wait out the upcoming election? No way, says Sir Ken. Legislation of recall or reform will take years. And he flatly points out that this can't wait: "Our students are showing up tomorrow."

We educators are the ones that must work to ensure our curricula are preparing our students for economic, cultural, and personal success. Sir Ken presents a rallying cry in his book and his presentations around the world. He reminds us that sustainable "human organizations are organic not systemic." The time has come--as always has been the case--for the centrality of teachers in educational reform. Curriculum design and assessement design cannot match the wit of teachers to make our schools relevant and rigorous for our students.

Sir Ken's knightly call for educational transformation reminds me of Postman and Weingartner's a generation ago. Effective teachers know of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Some educational ideas are always right for the practice.

Into the Woods

This past summer I read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. So I have been thinking about his ideas of "intimate immensity" as they pertain to how students (and well, anyone for that matter) sometimes perceive the World Wide Web. The screen about eighteen inches of my face has the lure of such intimate immensity.

Bachelard provides a metaphor of a forest to explain intimate immensity. It is the experience of being surrounded by the trees closest to you, and therefore, unaware of the vastness of the woods beyond this immediate, intimate circle. Perhaps the woods is as Robert Frost tells us "lovely, dark and deep." Or maybe not. Either way we can't see the forest for the trees. We are lured into a coziness, a security of a verdant canopy and steady bark pillars in our intimate vicinity.

Is that not how comfortable I feel as I type this in my own study, with my own familiar computer screen? Is that not how my students feel when they post pictures of their latest OMG moments with their friends? Sure. It's the intimacy of thinking we are talking only among one's "friends" or writing only to oneself that blogging can be.

Still, it's important before clicking "publish" or "upload" to remember ourselves and remind our students that as intimate as the Web may be when it's eighteen inches away or in one's lap, it and our audience may also be vast and unknown. Indeed, there may be a few "lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"

Fairy tales warn us about dropping breadcrumbs, straying from the path, and talking to wolves. As we tread into the woods of the World Wide Web and invite our students, these cautionary stories and a mindfulness to Bachelard's sense "intimate immensity" can help us find our way safely.



Image: Nicholas T. “Mossy.” Detail. Flickr. 19 March 2007. CC Licensed: BY-SA-NC

Think or Swim

In his introduction to How to See Yourself as You Really Are by the Dalai Lama, His Holiness notes "the most serious problems emanate from industrially advanced societies, where unprecedented literacy only seems to have fostered restlessness and discontent."

I see this in my students (and teachers, and just about everyone) as they obsessively check their mobile phones for texts, missed calls. I hear it in sound bytes from the latest news cycle that are taken without anything but superficial consideration and repeated as deep truths of what's happening today. Common sense, refection, and reverence are replaced by these sound bytes repeated as if mantras for a news cycle, and then replaced by the next gossip in the next moment.

Literacy, and here I am thinking of media literacy, must be stressed with our students to mean more than merely how to read a text or how to blog or make a video. Literacy is more than mere expression and understanding of a message.

Being teachers of English and across the disciplines, we teach our students how to read and write in a variety of media. It seems such a struggle to teach students to wade through myriad messages and identify propaganda and selected framing of ideas, let alone to dive into rhetoric and logic, then swim among questions and rise above to see things in larger contexts.

Of course, the total glut of media works against all of this. One might sit next to a lake and consider it for a long time without knowing its contents, yet today we seem awash in a tsunami. Ironically, survival in the latter is proportionally more crucial than in the former. One must not only be taught what water is, but also how to swim in it.

As we develop our students' abilities to digest media, some great emphasis must be given not only to forms but also to content. Knowledge isn't enough, thinking about the knowledge or lack thereof must be the focus. Perhaps if we ask our students to consider the messenger first, the message second, and then media third, we will be better equipping our students to find peace and contentment.

Image credit: "Grace Bay Beach Pier" 2007 by WisDoc used with permission of Creative Commons Copyright

Don't Stop Reading!

Whew! Howard Gardner, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing in the Feb. 17 Washington Post, reassures us English teachers and bibliophiles (we happy few) that the burgeoning new literacies will not eradicate the book.

I've often marveled at its portability and solarpowered independence, say nothing of its ability to house data in print along with my marginalia, sticky notes, and an occassional post card, train ticket, or clipping.

Despite Gardner's seeing that the book will hold its own among pods, laptops, and cellphones, he's not as confident about length of plots and complexity of story. He alludes to a scenario that thanks to social networking finds the readers of the future not alone long enough to find themselves lost in a novel for an hour or two, say nothing of three or four.

So perhaps plots will be chunked, serialized, or mini.

eLearning: Not for the Faint at Heart

This month I am participating as session presenter in four conferences on Web 2.0. Every presentation is a bit different than the other. Prepping for diverse audiences on the same general topic has its own challenges and rewards. The challenge is obvious, but the reward is what interests me.

As I work on my presentations--to be "an expert in the room"--I find out how little I know about a vast subject. There are so many wonderful meanings and applications of Web 2.0. Everyday there are new blogs, widgets, wikis, videos, podcasts ad infinitum. As I prepare to mention some "old standbys" I notice new tools on the horizon. It can be overwhelming to consider.

Likewise it is exciting. By sussing out the answers I need for the next presentation, I find new ways to use the Web. The "teacher-as-expert-training" in me panics over not having all four corners of the World Wide Web pinned down. The digital immigrant in me is thrilled to know a few more tools in the lexicon of educational media literacy.

The best advice I can give for those who attend my presentations and have the same feelings of trepidation of swimming in an ocean of information and technology that becomes fathoms deeper and leagues broader every minute is to embrace the concept of "perpetual beta." Yes, the world is changing--it has changed, it will continue to change. Most likely we teachers will never again "know it all." We may not even ever "know as much" about some of the emerging media as our students already do. That's okay.

As digital immigrants, we may never loose our BG (Before Google) accents, but if keep at improving our understanding of the IT lexicon and rethink our pedagogies that have served us well, we can offer our students one of the best models: that of a genuine learner.

Is YouTube the Next Google?

In Patricia Deuble's article Second Life: Do You Need One? (Part 1) in June 2007 issue of T.H.E. Journal, she describes her own process of frustration and discovery in figuring out how Linden Lab's online role-playing game worked. Listing what was helpful, she notes a tutorial on YouTube.

There's a growing list of SL video tutorials, plus the Top 10 Second Life Tutorial Videos on YouTube, which helped to explain inventory and how to make gestures, for example. Inventory is anything you collect in SL that you can put on your avatar, use to build, or give away.

This first made me realize that, until now, I would not have thought to suss around YouTube for a tutorial on anything, despite the fact that I have watched tutorial videos from YouTube when they were placed in the context of a site on a particular topic, including the YouTube tutorials on YouTube.

I guess I'm a slow learner.

So then I thought: as more people (and instituions and companies and schools) pick up camcorders and turn on webcams to create informative and educational content for YouTube (and other competing video websites) I imagine the phrase "YouTube it!" following "Google it!" Of course, Google has a video search section of its own, but not cultural clout that YouTube seems to currently enjoy.

Of course, with this development will need come the apparatus to teach students to evaluate, cite, and document their web video sources. Ah, yeah, that will take the fun out of it.

Blogstyle

Today, I'm thinking style. Not the "Devil Wears Prada" sort, but blogstyle. As a teacher of writing About.com's Avram Pilch's "Web Writing Rules to Live By" caught my attention. Here are his rules (although some really need his explication to provide the full benefit):

1.Conserve Your Words
2.Write to Empower, Not to Impress
3. Follow a consistent Web Writing Style Guide
4. Avoid Unnecessary Intro Text
5. Avoid Redundant Adjectives
6. Watch Out for Wimpy Words
7. Replace Wordy Phrases with Single Words
8. Replace Prepositional Phrases With Adjectives
9. Don't Turn Verbs Into Nouns
10. Use Precise Language

These are good rules to pass on to my students for their blogging as well as for their other compositions.

Image credit: "Prada Eyeware Models." Go Optic. 30 May 2007 www.go-optic.com/sunglasses/images/PRada12HS.jpg.

Blogosphere, San Francisco Calling

I'm looking forward to visiting San Francisco to present a session on Weblog Literacy to a conference of teachers later this week. After being in the blogosphere it's nice to put one's feet on terra firma and talk with teachers about blogging, share challenges and inspirations.

Sort of like the experience politicians must feel inside the beltway and losing track of reality, being in the blogosphere and surfing the Net one can get a rarified view of technology in education and loose track of what's really happening in classrooms across the country. To only read the tech-savvy blogger-educators can leave one with the impression that everyone else is way ahead of the game.

As far behind in learning about how to integrate Web 2.0 tools into my own teaching in comparison to others in my blogroll, I feel I am even more arears to getting colleagues and students and parents up to speed. It's easy to feel overwhelmed at how much there is to learn, and then to think about how what I'm trying to learn today is already being usurped by the "what's next." It will be good to find out what educators in silicone valley are thinking, tooling, and teaching.

Comparing my practice to some of the pioneers out here in the blogosphere, or even Californians on the ground may miss the point. As my uncle who used to take me and my belongings to college once told me on one of those sojourns said, "You'll always be better than somebody and somebody else will always be better than you."

Maybe that's where the paradigm of collaboration begins, and the spirit of competition peters out. Reading and writing blogs and web pages with colleagues and mentors, as well as with students, has enriched my teaching practice in a few short months and years--a grand self-paced professional development, it's like grad school, only without the federal loans and without the Act 48 (PA re-ceritification credits). As I figure out what I have to offer my students and my colleagues, I find benefits of what they offer in return.

Image credit: 14 May 2007 San Francisco, CA, USA. Google Maps

How We Read Is Determined by What

Or, Should English Language Art Teachers Widen the Net They Cast for Texts Students Ought to be Taught How to Read?

I've been swimming in The Fischbowl. On this turn of Littleton, Colorado's school administrator Karl Fisch's blog The Fishbowl, chock full of thought-provoking ideas and links for educators, I found myself in the deep waters of Terry Sales blog, particularly Sale's take on a Locus magazine column by Cory Doctorow, "You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen."

The article makes good reading and points out how technology has had a more-than-we-might-think impact on the arts, in particular literature.


In response to Doctorow's ideas, Sale, an English Language Arts teacher, ponders whether we should be teaching traditional literature texts or teaching reading in its wide arrayof textual forms, i.e. not just novels, short stories, poems, and plays, but the mutlitudinous variety of things we and our students read everyday. Sale notes that our curriculums mostly center on books,

"Traditionally, we require our students to read and pretend
to appreciate stories and novels. Yet the novel, along with being an
“invention,” as Doctorow suggests, is an art form. We don’t require all students
to take art appreciation classes, or study music theory, or attend the ballet.
But aren’t those forms as viable and important as literature? I tout novels as
explorations of the human condition and windows into other eras and cultures…but
don’t paintings and operas and films do that too? Is reading The Kite
Runner any more enlightening than watching Babel? And if the goal
is an understanding of universal human nature, how does an hour of reading a
novel compare with an hour of reading off a computer that’s connected to Google, [or] YouTube . . . ?"

I think he is suggesting that our ELA emphasis should be on reading--all reading, of everything. (I can feel the cringes: "Isn't the load of the English teacher too much already? We can't do it all!" and "What we teach is much more than a skill--it's a body of knowledge on the human condition." Yes, well, as they say shift happens.

Much of that shift has to do with what and how we read different things differently. Doctorow touches on the idea that form in which the message is sent has a great effect on how it is received. He points out:

The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of
the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive
style of the novel.

This fact coupled with the question the end of the above excerpt from Sale's blog, is what interests me as a teacher-student of the every-increasing myriad texts we are presented with in our culture. I find myself reveling and reviling in the mix, let alone wondering what my students are doing with it and how I can help them. I suppose it depends on where an English teacher finds himself or herself on the spectrum of teaching literary skills and of teaching literary concepts and of teaching literary content (i.e. for the purposes of this discussion, I'll define ((albeit vaguely)) as the expression of the human condition).


As I mention in my earlier post, visiting the New York Kid Robot store was like stepping into a new culture. It's the same feeling I got this morning when I followed a link to Sakai and tried to figure out what an organization that touts itself as a "collaboration and learning environment for education" really is, how it works, and how I might use it in my classrooms.

I wonder if all reading skills are transferable. How is reading a novel like reading a culture? Instead of teaching the organization of a novel, perhaps we should be teaching our students how to figure out the organization of a novel.

And what about the novel? In a hundred years hence will novelists be considered as quaint as poets seem today, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested a few years ago in an NPR interview? He sees that newer technologies for storytelling such as film and Internet are better at keeping people's attention.

Will showing students the organization of a novel help them with ablog as much as a film? What if films start following the scheme of a blog rather than a film? I guess, that might be a video game, right? Okay, what if linear plot doesn't matter at all. Will it change the way we view the human condition? Perhaps will we construct a view of the human condition that is more aligned to it.