try

trial

Ideas into Action

It is looking like next year I will be teaching 7th grade communications and 7th grade reading. These classes will be offered in 6 week blocks. Admin hopes this way to give reading support to kids year round. (whether this is the right way to accomplish this is debatable and not the point I want to make) In order to link the blocks, support reading year-round and support the content areas, I applied today for summer staff development money to create new courses that use technology to bridge the gap. Exactly how those courses would look remains to be seen (as does whether I will actually be the ones to teach them, but I imagine exploring some of the web 2.0 tools we have talked about. I welcome ideas!!

A Real World Example of Disruption

I was so excited today to discover a real-world current example of disruption! I get a daily email from Trendcentral which describes, as the name implies, popular trends. Today's email was about Netbooks, the computers used in the $100 every child a laptop project. The newsletter talks about how these computers are growing in popularity world-wide. Last year they accounted for 7% of the laptop market. Next year they are expected to get 12%. Apple and other big names are starting to experiment with their versions of this computer as well, so soon these cheap, small, not-so-powerful computers might be all over.

This fits the disruptive model because these computers were originally marketed to non-consumers: third world school children. They don't have a lot of memory and can't do all the fancy stuff my school-issued laptop can, but they can connect to the internet. In this day when more and more can be done and stored online (i.e. Delicious)and flash drives are cheap, do we all really need big, powerful laptops or even desktops? These delvelopments in technology also help this Netbook computer fit the model of disruption.

What makes me excited about this is that there now exists the real possibility that every student could have daily access to a computer--possibly even own one himself. If this happens, then online learning might actually have a shot at reality in the not-so-distant future.

Here is a link to the Trend Central article: http://www.trendcentral.com/WebApps/App/Global/Home.aspx

Making Reading Del.icio.us

Last Thursday I took my reading classes into the lab (finally) and showed them how to use Delicious. They immediately like the idea of being able to select their own weekly non-fiction articles and several kids posted their choices to the account I had created for the class. I decided NOT to have each student create their own account, but instead created an account called mrswarehime that all could access. I am a little concerned that there might soon be a lot of articles on the site, but we will see if they can remember how to search by tags. Tags, by the way, were something entirely new to my students, as was Delicious. Once again we see that even though they are "natives" there is a lot they don't know about technology that we "immigrants" can teach them. Read about my experiment on my school blog http://kwarehime.wordpress.com .

I am curious about how the Delicious account will work out. This past week most kids found and printed an article so they will have one for this week. It remains to be see if they will do the same when I am not taking them to the lab and holding their hands through the process.

VOKI WARNING
I noticed on the Voki Terms of Use Agreement kids under 13 are not supposed to create Vokis. This poses potential difficulties for me using it in class, as many of my 7th graders are not 13. It shouldn't be as much a problem with my 8th graders, though.

Comic ideas

I spent this evening comparing a few different comics creation websites: Pixton, Comiq, and Toondoo. See below for my examples from Pixton (Technology Dog) and ToonDoo (Technology Bear). I did not have an example from Comiq because it was it appear to me to used only photographs. You could upload these from your Flickr account or you could use the public domain photos provided. But these photos did not seem as adaptable to a school asssignment as did the comic characters in the other two programs. ToonDoo was by far the least complicated and probably the program I would use if I were to have an assignment to create a comic. ToonDoo was a very simple drag and drop interface. It did not allow the user to change the expression of the character, but it did provide multiple versions of one character to cover a wide range of emotions. Pixton also had a form of a drag and drop interface, but it took me a bit longer to figure the program out. It is more complicated, but it also allows the user more freedom to create and alter characters.

I like the idea of using cartoons for comprehension checks. Comics can also lend themselves to some some pretty creative/higher order thinking. I am going to write a proposal for some summer work to add more technology to my reading classes (they are going to undergo some big changes due to staff cuts and schedule changes). I would like to find a way to incorporate comics into the kids' blog--something else I going to require.

Technology Dog