geek.teacher

Check out this article about a new study.  It describes teenagers’ social interactions using modern communications tools.  It finds that, amazingly enough, they do not represent the coming of Satan.  In fact:

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on MySpace or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, “Living and Learning With New Media.” “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

So can my school district please unblock Twitter now?  That would make me happy.

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.

коли под наем
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

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.

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.

Facebook: the craze that’s sweeping the nation!  I know things are getting nutty when my wife recently signed up for Facebook.  My students seem to talk about MySpace all the time.  I have frequently seen teachers argue that, since the kids are on Facebook, we should be there, too.  Well, I am here to refuse the invitation.  I have been long opposed to personally entering the social networking arena.  I think it shows in that the social networking tools that I do use are pretty much mainly for connecting to other teachers.  While we may joke around quite a bit (at this very moment we are quoting Mel Brooks movies at each other), at the end of the day, I’m building relationships with people I can be useful to and who might be able to help me out.  I honestly didn’t get Twitter until I started using it to connect with other teachers, about a year after I first signed up for it.

I’ve often had a loose kind of feeling as to why I shouldn’t go to Facebook, telling people “In my day, when we wanted to forget people from High School, we could!”  This has been clarified a bit for me in this article by Scott Brown.

I’ve never lost touch with anyone, it seems. What I’ve lost is the right to lose touch.

Well, I absolutely reserve the right to lose touch.  Quite frankly, I take a pretty hardline view on my firends: if we wanted to stay in touch, we would have.  Given the amount of tools already at my disposal to be in contact with people I know, Facebook wouldn’t make much of a difference in my ability to keep in contact with somebody if I really wanted to.

Why do I feel this way?

Unlike my friend Jay, an actual friend that I talk to, I wouldn’t classify myself as a misanthrope.  Rather, I am an introvert.  To be specific, according to the Myers-Briggs, I am an INTJ.  In Caring for Your Introvert, Jonathan Rauch wrote the following:

In its modern sense, the concept goes back to the 1920s and the psychologist Carl Jung. Today it is a mainstay of personality tests, including the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Discovering this about myself in the past few years has helped to make sense of a lot of things for me.  I quite literally DO get tired by being around other people…not something easy when your job requires you to stand in front of a bunch of people and interact with them for 7 hours a day.  I’ve heard of Facebook as being something like an online party.  To me, the very concept is rather horrifying.  I want to a wedding yesterday and am exhausted.  Do I need any more of that online?  No thanks.  What I need is to sit quietly with my computer, listening to a movie playing behind me.  Fortunately, I have an understanding wife who so far does not seem to get too upset over my long periods of silence.

As a child, my mother was sometimes a bit concerned by how, during the summer, I wouldn’t necessarily spend lots of time with other kids.  Looking back, of course, I realize that I needed the recharge time.  Right now I’m honestly feeling sad for all the little Introverts who can’t escape socialization in every aspect of their increasingly connected lives.

Please keep in mind that I’m not arguing against the very concept of Facebook itself.  I’m just saying it’s not for me.  Like David Truss argues, 

I am not advocating for necessary presence, and I am not advocating for us taking on a burden of responsibility. I am saying that we should have the choice to be there and we should have the choice to interact with students on social networking sites such as Facebook.

School districts should absolutely not tell teachers they’re disallowed from using social networking tools, but at the same time, I hope some of the more die-hard “we need to meet them where they are” types understand that not every tool is for every teacher.  Facebook is most decidedly not for me.  All you other introverts, I hope you’ll continue to join me in being alone.

While I’m at it, maybe I should finally write that post about why I don’t like Plurk.  Take THAT, Social Networking sites!

Last week people were going crazy over a report that Web 2.0 has some real classroom benefits.  Not that I’m discounting any of those benefits, but they seem to me mostly touchy-feely type things, which, while delightful and good (who wouldn’t want more engagement and participation?), still kind of fall short of the more valuable “improves performance.”

So I’m surprised to see the apparent lack of excitement about this study saying that Internet use is good for the brain.  I guess it’s not as sexy since the study was done on old people, but I find it absolutely exciting, and would love to see a similar study done on the young’ns.

Each volunteer underwent a brain scan while performing web searches and book-reading tasks.

Both types of task produced evidence of significant activity in regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.

However, the web search task produced significant additional activity in separate areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning - but only in those who were experienced web users.

The researchers said that, compared to simple reading, the internet’s wealth of choices required people to make decisions about what to click on in order to get the relevant information.

They also get bonus points from me for throwing in a sly comics reference:

Rebecca Wood, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “These fascinating findings add to previous research suggesting that middle-aged and older people can reduce their risk of dementia by taking part in regular mentally stimulating activities.

“Older web users - ’silver surfers’ - are doing precisely this.

*Well, in theory.  I know some pretty dumb internet users, but that’s neither here nor there.

“If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”