Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

  • Wordling away :)

    Here’s a fun site to create instant tag clouds based on 3 different sets of criteria:

    • text you type in
    • url of a site with a feed
    • del.icio.us user name

    Here is one I created with this blog’s url:

    I see a few possibilities for this:

      • Seeing frequently used words in websites or various texts, written by or for students
      • Vocabulary words – a teacher could create a visual data mine for frequently misspelled or correctly spelled words to post in class
      • For fun because there is nothing wrong with doing things for fun :)

      I would like to see it embeddable…for now it seems to only be able to pop a tiny image into my blog (as you can (barely) see above.

      I discovered Wordle via TechnoSeeds. Thanks :)

    • An Essential Question for EdTech

      Integration

      Integration by me: I realized this painting was ‘done’ when I had integrated colours from the daffodil’s cup into the petals.

      Recently I wrote a post on digital literacy within the wider context of literacy and, in writing, touched on what I realize is central to my own teaching:

      an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

      It is not enough – it really, really isn’t – to advocate for technology in the classroom because it looks good and because others say it is important. A reflective school leader – administrator, teacher, support staff, consultant – will start digging deeper for essential questions around student learning in relation to the use of technology, as well as apply those questions to their own learning.

      I use technology in my teaching because literacy is the central focus for me at all times. “Literacy is about being able to make sense of the world we live in” (Dennis Harter, in comment to my post) and my deepest desire as a teacher is that I help students to begin to achieve this, that I give them the tools with which they can make sense of their/our world.

      I use a mashup of communication tools in my teaching, from word processing, to podcasting, to text readers, to visual editors, to blogging, to wikis, to debate, to improv, to (perhaps the most important) simple conversation. I do this because each of these tools can help different students make sense of the vast amount of information that is available to them in different ways. This is essential because each of my students need the opportunity to discover the tools that work best for them and I recognize that these are not necessarily the tools that work best for me.

      If I did not use technology in my teaching I would be going against all that I stand for as a teacher.

      That being said, if I return to my essential question from above, I need to stress that using tech to improve literacy is only part of the picture, part of the system. Literacy is a complex system made up of many and diverse components.

      I am moving more toward thinking about how my job is really to assist students in integrating their literate selves. In doing so, I need to recognize and honour the role(s) played by different technologies in their learning and in my own. That is essential for me.

      (this post was inspired by this one)

    • Literacies – digital and otherwise…or not.

      It’s a recurring theme – how do we develop our students’ literacy skills? Literacy is “an essential component of a learning society” and as educators we strive to ensure that our students develop the keenest literacy (and numeracy) skills possible so they can be active and productive members of society…blahblahblah…so that they can belong.

      Lately I’ve been thinking on how literacy is becoming more complex. Dennis has brought out this conversation in me, first on Learning 2.1 in response to the blog post: What is Web 2.0? and then on his own blog via Boy in the Bubble Revisited.

      (I made this, er, image with the tools at polyvore.com. Pretty fun little image collecting site. Go play :))

      Basically, with the technologies that have become a way of life – especially for our kids who didn’t know life before myspace, facebook, im, texting, etc…- literacy has whole new dimensions to do with immediacy of communication. We need to recognize and honour it in our teaching – this I believe. I also believe that we need to see it as a subset of the larger context of literacy.

      We can do this, perhaps, by asking questions like:

      • how does it fit?
      • where and when is it valid to use this type of literacy and where and when isn’t it?
      • how do we negotiate between different types of literacy?
      • and – how do/should we teach all of this?

      Dennis responded:

      Both have value, both need to be tapped. Stretching the mind is ALWAYS a good thing. And understanding culture and thinking and the wonder of human ingenuity and creativity has to continue.

      Personally I think there is more than a ‘both’. Looking at literacy as either digital or everything that came before is too dualistic for me – if I see literacy as a system (and I do) then digital literacy has an affect on all of literacy and vice versa. But I see where Dennis is going with this. It is a way(s) of reading and thinking and interacting with words, numbers, and thought that affects the way we need to teach.

      “Literacy is on shifting sands,” [Heather] Blair says. “It’s a moving target. Our definition of what literacy is is a moving target. Our definitition has changed radically.”(from What is Literacy, Nov. 2005, CBC News Online)

      Teachers struggle with motivation all the time. Intrinsic motivation – the motivation that comes from within ourselves – is seen as the type of motivation that triggers authentic and meaningful learning. By using tools that students are already comfortable with to access other forms of media/text is one way of developping intrinsic motivation – it may encourage students to ask: how does this fit in my world? And. more importantly, how do I fit in the world?

      So, all of this is leading to why I don’t think we can look at literacies as one or the other, as dualistic. I think that an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

      If we continue to look at new ways of being literate in contrast to more traditional ways then I think it will only be all the more difficult to make connections with our students while we are teaching. And isn’t that what we are trying to do?

      I’m just starting to think about this. I’m hoping y’all comment, ask me some questions to help me clarify exactly what I am getting at here…

      tracy

    • Invention at Play

      I discovered Adam Hunt via his comment on my latest LeaderTalk post. When I went to peruse his blog, I was met with his review of this great (fun) interactive game resource for the classroom (click the logo to go):

      I’m having fun and I’m going to test it out on my students next week.

      I also like the conversations on play that are available for viewing on the site, including transcripts. Here’s a quote from the site:

      “Children are making up theories of the world, going out and testing those theories, doing experiments to explore those theories, and that testing and experimentation is what we see when we see play. Even the very youngest children are already doing some of the same things that scientists are doing.”
      –Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, co-author, The Scientist in the Crib

      Here’s a direct link to the section of the site with the videos –> Does Play Matter?

      Do you play in your classroom?

    • Interactive Whiteboard

      A few months ago I found this interesting video about a home-made interactive whiteboard (a la smartboard) made by Johnny Chung Lee, from Carnegie Mellon University.

      Outside of the niftyness factor of making your own cool tool using a wii remote, this project can also create huge savings for schools. A smartboard can set you back from 1000 (without projector) to 5000 dollars (with all the bells and whistles, including integrated projector) , while this project, on top of a projector, will cost you about 45$ for the wii controller and a few extra dollars for hardware.

      This morning I found detailed instructions, including free software downloads for LED pen calibration to help ease the process, for building the project on Johnny Chung Lee’s website. Very cool stuff.

      Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote