Archives: tools

As is evident to anyone reading, I have struggled with blogging. My “fits and starts” are a result of my uncertainty of purpose and lack of time to allocate to this process. Who am I writing for? What is important enough to require my chiming in to the discussions in the blogosphere? How can I find the time to actually process issues of import? For me, Blogging has been more of a thing to be observed than a thing that comes naturally.

For others, however, it is a very different story. I have enjoyed the work of avid bloggers who write to think, and the product of their effort really contributes to the conversations about teaching and learning. This inspires me to keep at it, and brings up another important point — just because I am not driven to blog doesn’t mean blogs are useful as tools for learning. (Hear Homer Simpson here… “D’oh!”)

Two interesting ideas that seem right on to me. The first, Blogging the Research Process. In a September 2007 blog entry, Joyce Valenza recommends this practice as a way to facilitate transparency and constructivism, noting that through blogging, students can reflect on the process, get organized, and involve others in the process, ultimately contributing to the larger body of knowledge. The second, also from School Library Journal, is another simple yet powerful way to use blogging tools to enhance learning… a Book Blog. Like a book club, the Guerrilla Season Book Blog provides a place for students to engage their classmates and the rest of the world a project in which the “… diverse group exchanged thoughtful impressions about the book and pondered some provocative questions, adding a whole new dimension to the reading experience.” (Langhorst, 2006)

Simple, logical, powerful tools for learning. I get it. You can too! Pick up The Guerrilla Season and join Eric Langhorst’s book blog project between MARCH 3 and APRIL 4, 2008. See you there!

As an economics major, I know widgets. I have considered the elasticity of demand for widgets, the consumer surplus when widgets are priced competitively, and the change in price when the component materials for making widgets are suddenly more scarce. Always, my professors discussed economic concepts in terms of widgets.

Now, today, I am actually using widgets! Thanks to Widgetbox, I can easily create a way to keep up with ever-changing content like the LEARN NC features and the latest Instructify articles. I’ve even created one for this blog.

Just this morning, Bobby and I were discussing how we really need something to pull together the fiftyleven things we need to update, read, check, and generally pay attention to. How can we keep up with it all?

Pageflakes might just help me, as they promise in their byline, Get it Together. Using this tool, I can pull together the news, online tools, blogs and more that I am trying to keep up with. I can even create widgets and with one click, put them on my Pageflakes page. Pretty cool, eh?

I happened upon the New Media Consortium this week (and signed up as UNC TLT is a member organization!) and a report that may be of interest. The 2007 Horizon Report identifies key trends that and projects the adoption of various technologies in classrooms. The trends identified include increased importance (and unfounded assumptions) about information literacy skills, increasing globalization in the way we work and communicate, the interdisciplinary and collaborative aspects of digital scholarship (and the slow adoption of this in academia), the evolution of the read-write web (called collective intelligence and mass amateurization in this report) as an important contribution to scholarship … these validate the work we are doing at LEARN NC. The report also projects the top emerging technologies that will effect education in the next 5 years. This year’s report includes user-created content, social networking, mobile phones, and virtual worlds as the technologies to watch first. For more info, check out the attached report.

I search the web for information but for me that’s only half of it. I want to find the stuff from the sites I like… Edutopia, ERIC, Annenberg’s learner.org, and LEARN, of course… and so I either use the Google advanced search and limit my search to each site… one at a time, OR I can use OmniFind. I first read about this in an American Libraries article about enterprise searching. The focus of this article was more “how can we find our emails and documents on the intranet” and I suppose that is a desirable outcome as well, but for me it is more about searching my favorite education sites.

So when Walbert asks “How do 8th graders understand history?” I want to find some articles and resources to help me to answer this question. Using OmniFind I search the collection of resources the program’s web crawler has found… and I get America’s History in the Making which looks like a teacher’s guide to teaching history. Sure enough, the first part of this “… six-hour workshop focuses first on the Historical Thinking Skills developed by the National Center for History in the Schools.”

OmniFind, like Google Desktop, probably can be set to crawl my hard drive and who knows where they store the info that is scanned… so those of you (db) who are anxious about privacy might want to look into that more closely. I guess it depends upon what you have on your computer… as State employees our documents are public records so I am careful to keep personal stuff separate. I think the tool has potential so I’m taking my chances!