geek.teacher

Lesson:move around the room already!  I kind of creep out new students at first with my relentless pacing around the room, but it keeps them working.

About six months or so ago I became a big fan of Delicious.  For a long time I didn’t use it, because I didn’t see the point of keeping my bookmarks online.  Then, as I got more interested in all of the resources available online, I knew I needed to go with it for two reasons:

1. There are too many resources!  I’m up to nearly 400 bookmarks now, which is simply too much to keep efficiently organized in my bookmarks menu.
2. Not wasting my efforts.  I’d see something at work that I’d want to review later at home, or I’d find something at home that I could use at work with my students.  Online bookmarking solves that problem handily.

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A few months back, after checking out the options available, I switched over to using Diigo.  It offers more options, and has some nice grouping features.  Also, I primarily use it because it can send links to delicious every time I make a new bookmark, and would import from delicious when I started, but delicious doesn’t offer the same options.  This way I have a backup of my bookmarks, as well as access to tools that interact with delicious.  This way, too, if I’ ever someplace that blocks one but not the other, I won’t find myself lost in the middle of a lake without a paddle.

Like most of the social networking tools, I more or less exclusively use it as a professional resource.  I do the personal posting thing in Twitter to some degree because everybody does, and it’s what makes the community a way of getting to know people, but I’m really there for interacting with other educators.  This blog primarily, but not always, deals with education.  Any nings I belong to are education-related, and of the major social networking sites, the only one I’m on is LinkedIn, a professional resource.  Diigo is the same for me.  It’s all about things tangentially related to education.

One of the ideas I hit pretty early on, and have become increasingly consistent about, has been using my online bookmarking as a kind of developing online resume.  Now, whenever I comment on a blog, I always make sure to tag it with commented.  This way, every once in a while I can go back, take a look at the things I recently tagged that way, and go back for followup discussion.  No more asking for e-mails of followup, which clog my inbox.  No more subscribing to another RSS feed for only one thread of comments.  I know some people use CoComment to keep track of this stuff, but it doesn’t support Safari.

Any other tips out there for getting the most of these kinds of tools?  I know I need to start looking at the social part of social bookmarking a little bit more, but I’m sure people use them for all sorts of clever things I’m not thinking of.

As a bonus, here’s a Wordle of my tags:

Click to view full size

I was pretty pleased when I did this the last time…I created a Wordle from a month’s worth of tweets.  I did it the hard way back then, painstakingly copying and pasting from my history pages.  Fortunately, Tweetscan will now do the hard work for me, which allowed me to pretty quickly and easily create the following, which, for the most part, represents six months of serious tweeting.

It really blows me away how some words (just) are a total crux of my writing, which for some reason seems awful to me.  I had to edit that sentence in my mind 3 times to get rid of the word right then, and had to do it a couple of times for this sentence alone.  Agh!  It’s also fun to see the people that I send the most @ replies to, and I would like to point out that regardless of word order there, the following words do not normally appear in sequence when I Tweet:

As the holiday season fast approaches (Seriously, stores?  Christmas decorations already?), it’s a time when one’s mind turns to good will towards others, at least when not scoping out the latest pre-Black Friday sales.  I just last night saw that this year’s Child’s Play charity is now active.  

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

I have been proud to donate in the past, and am proud to contribute yet again.  Last year they added my local Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This year the children over there will see the following books from me:

• Where the Wild Things Are
•  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
•  Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

So if you have it in your hearts and wallets, I encourage you to donate even a small amount to this great charity that really contributes to better quality of life for children stuck in hospitals.

I love my iPhone (8gb, first edition, won it from TUAW for free).  Love it.  My wife loves hers, as well (8gb, 3G, $200).  While it’s not a perfect cell phone, it does so many things well and gets so much more use than any previous phone I had that I can’t help but adore it.

One of the best parts is how incredibly versatile the phone is.  I can take pictures and instantly e-mail them to my Flickr page.  I can make audio recordings with iTalk and transfer them to my computer over my wifi network.  I can browse my Reader feeds and One-Click order a book I see in Borders for 1/3 off the price in the store.  I can tweet to my heart’s content, talk to people on IM and Skype, listen to my favorite songs and watch videos while I travel or exercise, and, oh, yeah, I can make phone calls with it.

I’m anxiously looking forward to the official release of Qik, or some other video solution, as video is the one missing media-recording piece for this device.

All of this stuff is awesome, but it’s partly awesome because of the looking forward part of the process.  3G and GPS alone were not quite enough to get me to upgrade my own phone, although they were tempting.  Instead I’m holding out for most likely next year’s model, which I hope will include a better camera and at least 32gb of space so I can fit my entire music collection on it.

Before I got my iPhone, I had a Sony Ericsson w810i, which I also really liked as a pure phone with some nifty features built in.  It was my first phone with data capabilities and a camera, so I really enjoyed those aspects of it.  It was also more open in its Bluetooth configuration, which still irks me about my iPhone.  To this day, the one thing I miss the most since I switched is the tight integration the w810i had with BluePhoneElite.

The Ericsson part of the SE team recently released some projections for cell phones 4 years from now.  The highlights:

• 12-20 megapixel camera
• Full HD video camera
• 100+ Mbps wireless internet

So in 4 years, one device will be a replacement for many higher end devices of today.  Our students will have them.  Will we be ready?

Today the report cards for the First Quarter went out.  Since I would like to use this blog as an opportunity for reflection, here’s a summary of some of the things that went on in my classroom.  I’m basing the format to some degree off of the great Gamasutra postmortem pieces on video game development.  As an example, here’s the postmortem for System Shock 2, one of my all-time favorite games.

I went into this year with my head spinning.  We got tons of new programs coming into my building this year, and very little time to really wrap our heads around them before implementation.  For the first time in years, I got a completely new class of students.  Normally I maintain at least a few 7th graders in my class, but this year there were so many incoming 6th graders they just moved everybody out and plopped the new kids in.  It made me realize how much I came to depend on those older students to help show new students around the building and provide a good example of behavior in the classroom.  After two years of having two PCAs in the room, it’s now back down to just me and my classroom assistant, which means less adult eyes on my students all day long.  With that in mind, here’s the breakdown:

What went right:

• The Class Blog - I got permission to post pretty much everything for all of my students…work samples, pictures, audio and video.  So far I’ve just stuck to work samples and pictures, but am looking to expand.  I use the website as a springboard for linking the students to activities we’re going to do.  Every week we hit the computer lab and they go to the website and then follow links to their activities on Spelling City.
• Ramp-Up Literacy - our new reading program is actually really enjoyable.  I previously wrote about my Summer training for this program.  We had a followup training last week, and, while I still have a lot of kinks to work out of my routine, I think I’m starting to see progress.  I’ve been floored in the past week when one student asked, “Can I have a sticky note?  I have a question to write,” and another has asked if it’s ok for her to write a reading response in her journal while she waited for other people to finish up their work.  After reading When I Was Young in the Mountains, today my students went through and found the different things she wrote about, then started their own lists of memories for memoirs we’re going to create.  I’m already thinking of how I can use TikaTok to actually publish the books the students are going to create…you know, zazz it up a bit.
• Response to Intervention - I’m really very impressed by how my school started their RtI program up this year.  Overall things seem to be running smoothly, in no small part due to the supreme efforts of our literacy coach.  The Special Ed teachers all split up our students into different groups based on skill level for SRA Corrective Reading.  I took B1, the lowest SRA group we offer, and it’s been a delight.  I have five students who are actually motivated to learn.  They work their tails off, and we move at the ideal lesson a day pace.  It’s working out great.

What went wrong:

• Classroom management - I have a couple of students that have been especially challenging this year.  For one child, I’ve already written more referrals this last quarter than I think I have in the previous 5 years combined.  This places me in the awkward position of having to deal with that child frequently, which means I haven’t been able to really hammer in the kinds of behaviors I expect into all of the students…all of those little things that fall by the wayside when dealing with a child with a history of severe behavior issues.  Recently had a meeting with a parent, and things have been looking up a bit since then, thanks to great supports from the Behavior Consultant and Social Worker.  The child has been better behaved to some degree, and we’re getting more done now.
• Math - I was told I might be getting a new math program, waited to find out, was then told to go with an older program instead, needed to order supplies but they took away all Special Ed budget money this year, had to order through Admin office, supplies only finally arrived in my room yesterday.  Have been in a holding pattern basically until today.  Kids were so excited to get their books it wasn’t even funny.
• Paperwork - Our district is in a Special Ed paperwork compliance monitoring year.  It’s really going to make me regret not getting moved to a new position this year like I hoped for.

Overall, I’m pretty hopeful that things will get better as the year goes on.  Except for the paperwork.  Nothing will get better about that.  This might turn into another one of those years where I dread every e-mail I receive and every meeting I have related to Special Education, because they will only mean more paperwork for me.  More than anything else, it is the part of the job that roasts my soul.

Google just keeps the hits on coming.  They were nice enough to provide an embeddable electoral map, so I can watch results in real time!

I got a Flip video camera a couple months back on a great deal, but didn’t have much immediate use for it.  The other day, however, I saw that PBS and YouTube were sponsoring VideoYourVote.  I like the map-based search function on it in particular.  I decided this morning to take the Flip with me and record my experience.  It’s not particularly dramatic.  I didn’t get intimidated and the machines seemed to work fine.  But it gave me a chance to record an important moment and play around with a new toy and the newer iMovie a bit, so I’m glad I did.

Seriously.

We watched this* in my class today.

Homework for my students tonight: Remind your parents to vote.

*This, being a video about voting, is only worthwhile until Brainpop changes their current free video. So this might not make sense when it’s telling you about the Pilgrims or something.