Sufficiently Surmising Strategies for Securing Student Sites

There is a rich lode of web-based technology tools just waiting to be discovered and utilized. The unfortunate case is that most of the sites have been blocked or have the potential to be blocked by our school system. In other words, although these sites meet the standards of student-practiced technology, they can also open a Pandora’s Box of liability. It is almost like the powers that be dangling the golden carrot, if you will, in front of the teachers’ faces urging them to press forward into this new frontier, only to have it jerked away because the teachers veered off the path by misled promises of sustenance. There are ways to circumnavigate and get the cart back on the right and true path. We shouldn’t just turn around and head back to the old familiar watering hole just because the road got a little bumpy.

One of the sites on the TeachWeb 2.0 wiki that I really dug was the Go!Animate site. I am here to tell you with certainty that not all of the content is suitable on that site, but it is a very useful site and meets several criteria of the NTCE Definition of 21st Century Literacies which include, but are not limited to:

Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

The web-site allows its users to create animations and post them for fellow users to view and comment on. One of the uses might be an assignment in which the student interprets a class reading in the form of an animation. Another might be for the student to re-purpose an essay in the form of an animated short story. The teacher can also assign a group project during which a student in the group contributes part of a story and each subsequent student builds part of the storyline with the finished product a completed animation short. In the use of this web-site, students will most definitely be using tech-based skills and adding new levels of proficiency to what ever skills they may or may not already have.

Now comes the dark, hairy, smelly, underbellied threat to our journey. Some users can abuse Go!Animate and fill its pages with junk unfit for a seasoned sailor. But! The teacher can be responsible and monitor each of the students’ search history. Or even use Go!Animate as a class project with the teacher being the head honcho and supervising each student’s visit. The visits to the Go!Animate site can be made individually while the rest of the class works on something else like…I don’t know…maybe helping evolve the script for the class’s animated film. Another alternative might be to use the safer, more kid-friendly DomoAnimate where there would be no worries about web content as this site is monitored.(But where is the excitement in that?!?!?)

As always, we as teachers (future teachers in our case) must be vigilant when exploring these new worlds which seem to be popping up at every turn. There are many, many uses for these sites and we should not ban them altogether. (You know, Mark Twain was banned at one time. Probably still is banned somewhere in the Arkansas hills.) We should keep chasing that carrot. One day we might get a chomp. And even if we don’t, won’t the journey be fun?

My VoiceThread

I posted a link to my voicethread on the right, but Ifigured it might be easier to navigate if’n I go ahead and post it here too.

CLICK HERE! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!

Guaranteed to be the Weirdest, Creepiest thing you see today.

This is a short film by Spike Jonze revolving around a delusional Kanye West. The video starts a little slow and it’s crazy to see this huge hip-hop star aggrivating everyone he comes in contact with in the club, but stay with it ’til the end! *Warning: some offensive material and general creepieness!

*Apparently Spike Jonze pulled the video. If you search for it, I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere! Worth the view.

Dr. Tyson Keynote

First off, let me say wow! Talk about unlocking potential. I know I should realize this, but sometimes it is difficult to think of middle schoolers as young thoughtful minds. These middle schoolers at Mabry Middle have definitely shattered any type of stereotype they may have been labeled. All of their videos were very insightful and thought provoking. This truly is authentic assessment. The students hunger for the knowledge of their assignment and cannot wait to share it.

What I’m talking about is the video project assignment for Mabry Middle school. The videos are made by students who are studying particular topics and use a video project to enhance the learning process. They then are posted on Mabry’s web site for the entire world to see. I like Dr. Tyson’s quote, ” Why do we just put students’ work on the bulletin board, when we can share it with the world?” Again, wow. I can’t imagine what this type of encouragement can do for students’ self esteem. I never had the opportunity to do this sort of thing back in the dark ages when we still had typing classes. The closest thing I ever came to displaying my work was as a contributor for the school newspaper, and for that I got my share of ribbing.

What this idea seems to do is motivate the student to learn and to teach. Again we cannot be scared of technology, but we as educators need to learn how to harness it for use, not abuse. We definitely need to mediate in the use of technology in the classroom and use it in the classroom in such a manner that students come to respect the opportunity of using technology to learn.

Chapter 6 : Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts

Ahhh, the dreaded social web!! By the time I just got the hang of using my phone to text, along came social networking sites! A friend of mine once told me that I needed to ”join the rest of the human race in the 21st century” and sign up for facebook. I responded with, well, I don’t think I can repeat what I said so as not to offend a few people, but I thought I was being very witty in my response.(If you want to know, ask me in confidence next time you see me) But now, every line of communication seems to be going the way of, what I find to still be somewhat impersonal, computer generated communication.

In the “Welcome to the Twitterverse” section of the chapter, I found some enlightenment about this “micro-blogging”. Just as I thought of facebook, I thought, Why the hell would I even care if so and so is pulling into the parking lot…going up the stairs…passing the water cooler…sitting at his desk…I never thought of the application in education. In the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a’ changin’”. As teachers we have to adapt to these rapid social (using the word loosely) digital interactions, and what better way to involve students than with something like “Twitter Collaboration Stories”? What a cool idea! 

The social bookmarking section also revealed another great tool for the classroom. I know we have gone over this in class and have even set up del.icio.us accounts, but explained in this chapter was a little more insight and depth on the advantages of social bookmarking. The keyword matching deal is pretty cool. Being able to subscribe to someones tag and see all of the information they have gathered about the topic, as well as info others who have subscribed to their tag, and to their tag and to th…talk about your six dgrees to Kevin Bacon! When I have more time, I plan to explore some more. Exciting stuff!

Glogster, Gabcast, Wordle, etc.

These are really cool sites and I can completely see using these in the classroom. Glogster is a cool poster creation site that reminds me of the posters I used to see in the halls back in high school. Yes, I have a fair amount of memory recall from those years! The posters would almost always contain some motivational or inspirational message even though only nerds like me paid attention to them. This is a perfect way to let students show what they learned from either a specific lesson in the class or a book they have read. It doesn’t mean that they should NOT write a report, but this would be the perfect companion to a writing assignment in the classroom.

Gabcast seems pretty cool too, but I don’t quite know what the application for the classroom might be. I guess I’m still kind of an in-the-box thinker when it comes to  all of the rapidly advancing advances in classroom technologies. I’m sure if I sat and thought about it for a while I could come up with something interesting to do with Gabcast, but for know it’s just another novel idea to me and a new, un-attempted recipe in my classroom cookbook.

Wordle is a pretty cool site too. Like Glogster, students can input words to make a pretty neat looking design with their word choices. Again, not necessarily an essential classroom tool, but I think students might like to create something interesting with text from either the main idea of a book or content of a poem or something like that.

These seem to be great tools to use in the classroom, and I am excited about using technology in the classroom.

MediaLit

I am writing this from the table in the corner of a local cafe as we are without internet access due to the recent storms and flodding and general nature’s fury. I am often reminded, as most of my generation, of Pink Floyd’s The Wall when it comes to realizing technology on the classroom. If you have seen the movie, the scene I am talking about is when the Floyd are playing the tune “Another Brick in the Wall” and all of the kids are at their desks chained to computer monitors, which is remarkable really, considering the film was made in 1982 when the thought of computers in the classroom was all but a possibility. They are then shipped down conveyor belts into the black pit of assimilation. This was pretty much what everyone feared about quickly advancing technologies: we will rely solely on technology and human interaction will become a dinosaur.

I remember the technology we had in the classroom when I was in middle and high school: filmstrips and videos. It always seemed an act of congress for the teacher to be allowed to even think about checking out a television and vcr on one of those roll-y cart thingies, let alone show a video in the classroom. There was one teacher who had a Commodore 64, but the only time we used it in the classroom was to play Larry Byrd vs. Magic Johnson. Now it seems that every classroom has at least some more advanced resources for their classrooms than the television and vcr on the roll-y cart thingie. Technology has become the fifth generation in captivity tiger, tame enough to pet and hand feed, but still dangerous enough to handle with caution.

Like the MediaLit orientation said, “we are exposed to more mediated in one day, than our great-grandparents were exposed to in one year” and we as future teachers need to understand how to best deal with the responsiblility we have been entrusted with when manipulating this tiger and introducing it in our classrooms.

As future teachers, we need to train ourselves to watch, explore, listen with a more objective point of view than just being a casual observer. We need to always have our magnifying glasses at the ready to inspect what our students might be able to learn and convey in the class what they are exposed to through multimedia interaction. We never know where our next lesson can come from.

Disney.com, Nick.com

We looked at several websites searching for ads and web-sites aimed at kids. I thought it would be a sure bet to find something aimed at kids since I have a 14 year-old son. The problem is, he doesn’t like most of the stuff advertisers want him to like. He listens to the Clash, watches The Office and plays video games on the Nintendo 64. So I thought about the stuff he liked when he was younger and it hit me: He used to watch the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. So we started there.

I noticed that a lot of the shows advertised on the Disney web site were for teens; dealing with relationships and parents and school, but they had a place where kids could type comments about the shows they watched and most of the comments were posted by kids who were under the age of ten!

The website itself was pretty slick. There were a lot of interactive games and video clips cautioning the environmental threat upon the earth and what kids could do to help. This is a noble attempt and a positive thing to let kids feel like they can be empowered even if they are under the oppression of their parents, but I think that, while kids should be aware of the impending environmental doom of the planet, they still need to be kids.

On the Nick.com sight, the atmosphere was much different. There were embedded video clips of the shows available on Nick, videos games about the shows; it just seemed more like a place for kids to go hang out and play games and be kids without the threat of conscience taking over.

The Cybersell

I enloyed reading this article. It didn’t take long for advertisers to find that there is a new way to try and force products down teens throats. Utilization of web sights with slick interactive pages is perfect for product placement and attachment. With today’s teen spending an average of “three hours a day”(55) on the internent, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

I do think that today’s teens are a lot smarter than we give them credit and aren’t easily swayed, but trends still find their ways into the lives of teenagers as a means of keeping up with their peers.

I think it is hilarious that these marketing types try to keep up with the lingo “that pretends…peer-to-peer legitimacy.”(51) The example Crovitz gave of the McDonald’s ad with the caption of  “I’d hit it” is hysterical. I remember seeing that in a McDonald’s drive-thru lane once and just cracking up, almost to tears thinking about what that meeting might have been like. Even though these execs think they have a finger on the pulse of the youth today, they are most times clueless.

I also like the Doritos example. The advertisers try all of these “slick” camera angles and the “jittery motion” of the camera work to try and make it exciting, when it really comes off just corny. There are some music video programs (NOT MTV) that my fourteen year old son watches and he says he likes the videos, but all of the camera work when the veejays are talking, kind of makes him queezy, also noting that it is just plain corny.

The other thing in the Doritos’ example that caught my attention was the part about the boom box being powered by a bag of Doritos. I think this can give the message that Doritos is a necessary part of life. Kind of a ballsy representation of a snack food.

The internet is not going away and these full-on attacks from product based web sites will continue to push the envelope and try to further inhabit the thoughts of our youth. I agree with Crovitz that we need to be prepared as teachers need to “deal proactively and thoughtfully with all manner of online branding, selling, and messaging, rather than simply reacting.”(55)

We can’t run from the Cybersell, nor do we need to embrace it. We need to meet it fully armored and face-first in this battle for our students’ minds.

Wikipedia “group” discussion/edit and Chapter Four reflection

Our “group” decided to find a funny word , I guess, and find the origin or whatever. I did not really get to participate as actively as I had hoped. The “group” chose the word quebracho. Obscure enough, I suppose. The physical encyclopedia was very informative about this hardwood tree, supplying one with all of the knowledge of the quebracho one would need. The Wikipedia entry was not very informative, just a retooling of what the encyclopedia had to offer. It just listed the different species names, the etymology and the general usages of the tree. The Britannica.com site did refer to different web sites and articles available for perusal. The physical encyclopedia was definitely more helpful in finding more information on this arbitrarily chosen word. Let’s just say I wasn’t too thrilled about this particular “group” experience. (Diatribe withheld)

I did enjoy the Wikipedia exercise. We were instructed to find a Wikipedia article and edit it either for content or for grammatical errors. After much searching for topics I was interested in, I discovered that I could add no further insight or knowledge about my topics of interest that hadn’t already been provided. I decided to think smaller, more locally. I thought I might find some interesting information on Ringgold, Georgia, where I live, but the facts that Dolly Parton and Carl Dean as well as George Jones and Tammy Wynette were married there and various other smatterings that I’m familiar with had already been included in the article for Ringgold.

I then decided to dig further in my past. I remembered that parts of the movie (yes, movie, not film) The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia were filmed in Rossville, Georgia. I know this because as a ten-year-old Star Wars fiend, I had to go see Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) who was co-starring in this movie with Kristy McNichol(70′s hottie). My parents took me to the set and I saw him, but didn’t get close enough for an autograph and Kristy was nowhere to be found. All of the information that I could find said the movie was filmed entirely in Dade County,  not in or near Rossville or Ringgold. I know this is not true because I saw Mark Hamill, dammit, and the Rebel Diner in Rossville was destroyed for a scene in the movie, but there was no info to substantiate this.

I then had an “Aha!” moment. I remembered my dad talking about an elderly lady he knew who once played baseball for the  hometown Chattanooga Lookouts. I did a Wikipedia search for Engel Stadium (former home of the Lookouts) and there was nary a mention of her. “Aha!” I found my place in the Wikipedia world. You can read my Wikipedia edit here. There is also an external link provided for more information about this historic (You’ll see what I mean!!) event.

I loved chapter four. It opened up a whole new world to me and I am ready to go exploring. I never knew what the Wiki in Wikipedia meant until I read this chapter and I’m surprised I didn’t pick up on it until now. I mean, I’ve only suffered through my wife watching Blue Hawaii (She’s an Elvis freak) about a hundred times.

When I started reading this chapter, I began to think of all of the teachers who might have thought, Why in the world would I use this? when Wikipedia first started making its presence known. Then I thought about how my grandmother, who started teaching in a one-room school house and retired 40-plus years later, would respond to all of this technology in the classroom today. I remember when my mom and dad and my aunts and uncles pitched in to buy her a microwave for Christmas. She opened it up, looked at it and asked, “Now what in the world am I going to do with that?” Unlike the microwave (heat stuff), Wikis seem to have boundless opportunities in the classroom.

First of all, I didn’t know there things called wikis until this class. I thought Wikipedia was just some clever name for an online encyclopedia. I had looked up stuff on there before since most of the times I do Google searches, Wikipedia is the first source that pops up. I knew it could be edited somehow, but editing Wikipedia was just a passing thought and a reference in a Wierd Al song to me.

The thought of being able to start my own classroom wiki excites me. I think it would be a great opportunity for the class to share what they have learned. I also like the thought of a collaborative class essay. I think both of these will give students a sense of pride from contributing to something bigger than just writing words down on paper because that’s what they’re supposed to do. I look forward to using all of this technology in the classroom instead of just using it to heat stuff  or just leaving it in a box like my grandmother did her microwave until her dying day.

For the record, my Wikipedia entry was edited less than three hours after I posted it. Man those wikipedians are sticklers!!