Final Exam: The Agony and the.... Stuff I Liked

Well, I don't think I have a lot to say here that I haven't already said, but I'll try to sum it up.

Things I liked about the class.....

I'd say three things.....

* One was being forced/helped to actually try out some of this stuff -- the RSS feeds, Del.icio.us, the wikis, blogging, etc. Even though I didn't like all of them, it was good that I was finally made to sit down and go through the steps to try them. So I guess the hands-on part of it is what I'm saying.

* Secondly, it was good (though overwhelming at times) to see all the tools that were available out there, to play around with some of them, and to bookmark them for further exploration.

* And finally, though I already knew about wikis and was sold on the idea in a vague sort of way, it was great to discover, especially on that one site I found, some excellent, specific ideas for how to use them.

The part I didn't like was the 2.0 hype in most of those videos and articles, and the snarky put-downs of any sort of older, pre-2.0 styles of teaching. I think you turn off a whole lot of teachers (especially older veterans like myself) if you imply -- don't just imply but outright say -- that the way they've always taught is crap. There is no one good way to teach. There are many ways to do it well (or badly), and the key, I think, is for teachers to find the way that works best with their personality, while still being effective. For some that will continue be a lecture with a chalkboard, and if that works, then it needs to be okay. Some of the best classes I ever had simply involved teachers talking -- whether because of their erudition, their humor, their passion for the subject, their personality.... even within that one style there were many variations and the reasons they were good were never the same. I would never have wanted to replace those classes with wiki-making and blogging. But I'm sure many other teachers will make wikis and blogs into wonderful, revelatory experiences for their kids -- and I'm sure others will use them in dull or irritating or confusing ways that will not work at all. There is no magic bullet for teaching! It always comes down to the subtle interactions between a teacher and his/her class and between the class members themselves, and that is always going to be true, regardless of whether computers and websites are involved. Yes, we should be learning about what we can do with this new technology, and sure, the kids need to learn to use these tools skillfully and intelligently. But I was really annoyed by the hype, and sometimes personally insulted by the portrayal of other, more "primitive" kinds of teaching.

Least favorite task was probably the RSS feeds, just because I was so frustrated by the way they're organized. But I've griped about that enough already.

Will all this change my teaching? In some ways, yes, if I manage to follow up on it as I hope to do. I don't buy the idea that it's a brand new paradigm which must now supersede everything else I've ever done, and that everything that happens in my class must now be web-based, collaborative, and decentralized. But it certainly gives me some new tools and tricks with which to shake things up a bit.

As for what, specifically, I think I'll do with this next year, I imagine it'll include at least two or three (three or four??) things on this list.....

1. Continuing to work on our class wiki in general, expanding what's on there, and making it a central organizing tool for the class (like Martha and Brian's seems to be).

2. More specifically, continuing to use it for history study guides and such -- doing more with things like Flashcard Friends, Quizlet, etc., and trying out TimeGlider as, possibly, a central frame of reference for the history course, or at least as a tool for kids to use in some individual projects.

3. Also, using the class wiki for all the stuff the kids do for indies -- book and movie reviews, writing about things they've done for community service or things they've built or created -- and as a place for my indies suggestions, links to relevant websites, etc. This feels like a huge undertaking and it's a bit intimidating. I'll probably need a lot of help from Amy and company. But the results could be great. I love doing the indies, but it's always been a huge, disjointed, fragmented part of the class, and kids have never been as aware as I'd like of what other kids are writing about and doing. This could be a way to make it more of a shared experience.

4. Trying out one or more of those wiki ideas that I listed in Task 7 -- the wiki debate, perhaps, or the collections of various things, or the oral history projects.

Overall, despite my frequent frustration and constant whining, I have to admit that I'm glad I did this, and I really hope I can make myself follow up on it in the months to come. Thanks Amy!

Task 12: "Teaching" Others

Well I wasn't too sure about the idea of "teaching" my colleagues something, because I think most (if not all of them) are a lot further along with this stuff than I am. But in faculty meeting today, Jennifer and I did each spend a few minutes at least talking about some of the things we discovered in Pi2.0, and I think we managed to show a few things that at least some people hadn't known about before. I showed the TeachersFirst: Wiki Walk-through website, which had the wiki ideas that I liked so much, and the SeoMoz site (I still don't know what that means), which shows the award-winning web tools in various categories. On that site, I pointed out the genealogy and mapping stuff as examples. And then I briefly showed and talked about TimeGlider and MixBook and LetterPop and TeacherTube, and mentioned that I'd been using Flashcard Friends.

Kind of ironic, I guess -- all that griping and complaining I did and here I was promoting the whole thing. Well okay, I did say that I was annoyed by the 2.0 hype in a lot of the videos and articles -- and by Google Reader. But I also said that I was glad I did it and that, if you take the hype with a grain of salt, and if you just accept that you're not going to like all the tools you try, you do end up learning and discovering some cool stuff. So I guess I'm officially a convert, now that I've done some proselytizing. Do I get a tattoo or an armband or a toaster or something?

Task 11: Walking (Some of) the Walk

I've actually tried a few things since starting the Pi2.0 course. None of them have been exactly revolutionary, but for an old 20th century type like myself, I guess they were a good start.

First I started using the class wiki more -- well, using it period. I hadn't at all since a couple of the kids created it last fall. I think the first thing I did was to post some things that the kids had brought in for vocabulary class. We had been spending part of each class talking about individual strange or interesting words, slang, grammar oddities, etc. -- usually stuff that I brought in, and most of it picked up from a podcast I like called "A Way With Words". So finally I had a week when they had to bring in something themselves. It could be a phrase or a bit of slang that they hear a lot and wonder about, a particular word they really like or dislike, a pet peeve about language, or some examples of "crash blossoms", "Tom Swifties", or "mountweazels" -- all things we had talked about in class. (Too complicated to explain here -- ask me sometime.) Anyway, so we had a couple classes of the kids just bringing those in and sharing them, which was fun, and then I realized that I could collect them all and post them on the class wiki for all to see. So I basically just put them all into a word document, turned that into a pdf, and put a link to it on the wiki. Maybe not the best way to do it, but it's the one I was able to figure out, and it worked fine. In the future, I know, I could have the kids post their contributions themselves, but I haven't quite attained that level of web-enlightenment yet, or courage -- or trust, really, that the kids would do it in a timely and decent fashion. I'll try it next year, though, and maybe they'll prove me wrong.

My other experiments were all for history class. We were talking about a bunch of the key figures of the Enlightenment (Newton, Descartes, Galileo, etc.), and as usual I had gathered pix of all these people from Google Images to show in class while talking about what these folks had done. In the past it's been hard for the kids to see these pix again later, unless I created documents that included them and then printed/xeroxed those. I've done that, but it's expensive, it wastes paper, the xeroxed pix are just black & white, and it's way too costly to print them out in color. But this time, thanks I guess to Pi 2.0, it finally dawned on me that -- duh -- I could just post them on the web. I spent a lot of time on it, and there's probably a more efficient way to have done it, but I ended up creating a collage for each person, using both pix and facts, turning them all into pdfs, and posting them on the class wiki. So there was all the basic info, plus color pictures, posted on the wiki for all to see (and print out for themselves, if they really wanted), and for all to study before the test.

Later we covered the American colonies and the American Revolution. I went through it all the first time in my usual way -- talking and using the white board (gasp!) -- and I'll probably continue to do a lot of that in the future, by god. I like doing it, and I think the kids actually like it -- or most of them anyway. Yeah, it's a lot of me talking, but it's also a conversation, and it's personal, and I'm really into this stuff, so I think my own enthusiasm makes it more interesting. And I do, and probably still will, insist that they take notes of their own the first time through, because it forces them to be more alert and engaged, and because you learn things just by writing them down. But this time, when we were done, I created a study guide that included all the material we had covered, with fill-in-the-blank questions and pictures, and posted it on the class wiki. The kids studied that and when we had a test on it, the questions came straight from it (though I had put them on index cards and let the kids draw them randomly). When we get to the big Jeopardy game, in which we review everything we've covered in the course, that study guide on the colonies and the Revolution will still be there for them to use in their study groups. Here, too, I know there's a further step I can take -- having the kids create their own study guides and post them, or having them collaborate to create one central study guide. I'll probably try that at some point next year, although I'm skeptical about how well they'd do it on their own, how equitable the contributions would be on such a big collaboration, how thoroughly they'd cover the material -- even just whether their sentences would make sense. We'll see.

And then my most recent experiment, just this past week, was to use Flashcard Friends. We had covered the Constitution, with lectures and note-taking about how it had come about, the basic contents of each article, the 27 amendments, etc. In the past I would've just had them study their notes, maybe in small groups so that they could help each other fill in the gaps. But this time, thanks to Pi2.0, I decided to make a deck of Constitution flash cards and post them online. It ended up having about 150 cards, some of them even including pictures of the key players. We had a couple of days when the kids broke into their study groups and went off to study on various laptops and desktops. (Though we had a big scare the first day, when we discovered that Flashcard Friends was blocked. Thanks to Brian and co. for quickly responding to my distress call.) After a few days of that, and of the kids also using it on their own at home, we had the test, and the way I did it was to open the deck on my computer, project it on the whiteboard, and have it pick questions randomly, by setting the deck on "shuffle". Now, none of this was especially creative and I didn't expect it to make much of a splash, but the kids really seemed to like it, most of them got the material down cold much more quickly and thoroughly than I expected, and just the simple suspense of not knowing what question would come up next made the test itself more interesting. We spent the entire period on the test and went through 40 or 50 cards, but they didn't complain a bit and were actually kind of into it. This particular kind of material -- with fill-in-the-blank questions and occasional longer answers -- doesn't adapt well to some of the Flashcard Friends features. You can't really use the "true-false" or "multiple-choice" options when testing yourself, for example. But even with fewer modes available, it was very effective. Again, I know, there's the further step of having the kids create the flashcard deck themselves, or together as a collaborative thing. There wasn't time to try that this time -- with the end of classes nearing we're moving pretty fast and I had to just create the deck myself. But, as with the other items above, I'll probably let them try it next year, despite my doubts about how well they'd do it.

Like I said, nothing terribly daring, and I haven't ventured into having them do collaborative stuff online yet, but hey -- baby steps, right? I'm an old and especially stubborn dog trying to learn some new tricks.

Task 10: Tools Out the Yin Yang

I liked seeing more of the tools that are out there, and I bookmarked a whole bunch of them and dabbled with them briefly. But I gotta use the word "overwhelming" again. There's just so much, and even with the tools I liked and bookmarked, I wonder if I'll ever find the time to learn how to use them. It doesn't help, of course, that my frustration threshold for such things is so incredibly low. If the instructions don't make sense, if it won't let me do things the way I'd like, I tend to lose patience fast, and I avoid trying for a long time because I'm just not prepared to go there. But anyway, some possibly useful stuff from the "discovery list"........

As any of my history students could have predicted, I was most interested in TimeGlider, the tool that lets you make online timelines. I've played with it a bit and there are several things I like about it -- especially the fact that you can use a broader view but then zoom in gradually to reveal more specific people and events, which then fade out again as you zoom back out. Seems like it will be difficult on a computer screen to display the really broad view that I often prefer, but for focusing in on, say, a century at a time, it could be great. I could see using it as a basic online framework for an entire course, or having kids each study a century or decade and create a timeline of their own. But I've barely scratched the surface of how the thing actually works. I just don't have time (no pun intended) to mess around with it. Also, it's still a "beta" version (which I take to mean that it's still in development), which makes me a little reluctant to put lots of effort into creating some timeline, only to have it disappear or become obsolete as they improve the program. But this will definitely be high on my list of things to play around with this summer, for possible use in the fall.

There were some other things on the list that seemed cool and that seemed, vaguely, like they could be useful in the classroom, but I'm not quite sure how yet. LetterPop, for example, looks like it makes really nice newsletters pretty easily, and maybe that's something we could find a use for..... for a junior high paper, perhaps? MixBook looked nice also, and I thought maybe we could use it to create a sort of home-made class yearbook next year (which we could maybe sell as an auction fundraiser??). I'm especially interested in that because I just got the first decent camera that I've had in decades, and I'm eager to put it to use.

And then there were some sites that sounded interesting but didn't impress me. I was intrigued by Sketchcast, though not quite sure how I'd use it in the class. But when I went to the site I couldn't get any sound to play in the samples. I know they don't always have sound, but some of the ones I tried (including the "Introduction to Sketchcast") were clearly supposed to. Couldn't hear a thing, though -- and no, I didn't have my computer sound muted. So that didn't exactly inspire confidence. And I was interested in the United Streaming thing, which looks like just part of the Discovery Channel website, but I found their webpage pretty much incomprehensible. It's very difficult to see how one is supposed to use it. I think I'll stick to Teacher Tube for that sort of stuff.

As for tools I found on my own, I had the best luck using the first recommended site, seomoz.org. I liked that they showed the top three award-winning sites in various categories. The most intriguing categories for me were genealogy and mapping applications, both of which I could see having kids use for individual social studies projects. I bookmarked MyHeritage.com and Geni.com for the genealogy stuff and played with them a bit. They both let you set up a family tree, which other family members can add info to, and they give you all sorts of tools for doing genealogy research. Can't quite tell which one is better. (That seems to be true of many of these tools -- there are several that do the same basic thing, so in addition to learning to use any one of them, there's the added confusion of wondering whether it's even the best one to be learning. So what do you do -- spend hours learning each one and then choose??) As for the mapping applications, the first place winner (Frappr) won't open for some reason, but I bookmarked the other two -- Wayfarer and CommunityWalk and have dabbled a bit with the latter. I like the idea of these too -- that you can make your own maps by manipulating the ones available online. Obviously something that could be fun to have kids play around with. The other site for tools, go2web20, was just completely mind-boggling. Way too much stuff, and though there are brief descriptions that appear with each logo, it's hard to tell from many of them what the tool actually does. And a lot of them seem to be related to (shudder) Twitter, which I hate with a passion.

Anyway, of the tools I did find, I hope to spend more time with all of them this summer. It might be better, though, to concentrate on learning and implementing just one. That would probably be TimeGlider -- but only if it's not too risky to start creating things with their "beta" version. I need to find out more about that.

Task 7: Finally a Eureka Moment

So I wasn't seeing much in the wiki material that I didn't already know and wasn't feeling terribly inspired by it. I mean, I've started using my class wiki (a little bit) and I already knew that I wanted to do that more. Martha & Brian's great class wiki seems like a nice model of what I could do in the future -- a way to pull together all the things that are going on in a "homebase" class like theirs or mine. So yeah, I knew I wanted to do that, but it still didn't seem like much more than an electronic organizing tool. And though I looked at most of the sample wikis listed and liked them fine, none of them quite related to the kinds of things I teach, so they didn't set off any sparks for me personally. Inspiration was not striking.

But then I checked out the "Teachers First: Wiki Walkthrough" site that was suggested (http://www.teachersfirst.com/content/wiki/wikiideas1.cfm), and I don't know what it is about that particular list of ideas, but suddenly I started to realize some of the things I could do with this. Their lists of social studies, language arts, and miscellaneous wiki ideas really struck a chord. I ended up copying and pasting them into a document so that I could have them all listed in one place, and even as I did so I was typing in ideas and variations of my own. That was the spark I've been waiting for.

I also included in the same document a section from the "Wiki Wisdom: Lessons for Educators" document (http://jdorman.wikispaces.com/file/view/Wiki+Wisdom+Article.pdf) -- the section called "Ed. Wiki Tips" -- because it addressed a bunch of issues that I've thought about, especially that of monitoring class wikis so that kids can't just goof around on them.

But it was the ideas from that first site that felt like a turning point for me. I'll be consulting that list a lot for things I want to try, maybe as soon as the next few weeks (if I can find time to set something up), but certainly for next year.

Some of my favorite ideas (from their lists or from my variations).....

* A mock debate in Wiki form -- over some particular issue, or between two historical figures, or between opposite sides of the political spectrum, or between two famous philosophers.

* Wikis that collect examples of things discussed in class -- propaganda, advertising, cliches, slang, mythological or historical allusions, certain kinds of music or art or humor, etc.

* "Fan Club" wikis for, say, particular historical figures.

* A local history wiki for, say, Little 5 Points or Emory Village. Actually I'm thinking we should start one for Paideia, with a basic timeline as a framework, recording all the facts and milestones of the school's history, but with places for people (including alumni and alumni parents) to add anecdotes, memories, etc.

* A wiki with oral history and pictures that kids collect from various kinds of people they know -- war veterans, activists, grandparents, people in different careers, etc.

* A "What I Think Will Be on the Test" wiki -- a collaborative study guide that the kids could make before a test.

* Travelogue wikis, especially by kids who have missed school for some important trip (like the one a kid in my class is about to take to China).

* Actually the one above made me realize that a lot of the things my kids do for "indies" (independent credits) -- things like community service projects at church, artwork, building things, paging at the State Capital, etc. -- could be reported to everyone on the class website with pictures and everything, instead of just written about to me privately. Same with all the books and movies they write about every year. They could all be posted to the class website instead of just turned into me. (Though that's a ton of stuff -- will there be room for it all? Organizing it all could be tricky.)

* A "continuing story" vocabulary wiki in which the kids have to collaborate on a story by each adding a sentence that uses a vocab. word.

* An orientation wiki that collects tips and such for new kids on how to deal with junior high and our class.

* Wikis in which kids have to simulate some real-world challenge, like getting a job or buying a car or dealing with a terrible disease or disability, and have to write about what they learned and went through along the way.

Great stuff and, like I said, it's finally making me realize what some of the possibilities are for all this.

Task 6: A Cool Tool or 2

Some interesting stuff on the "cool tools" list, and of course some annoying stuff.

It's a little embarassing, but not at all surprising, that my favorite was the most old school -- the flash cards. The uses are just so obvious and immediate, and I may start as soon as this week, since we're studying the Constitution and Bill of Rights and there's a lot for the kids to remember. (I'm a little unsure of the logistics of making a deck and then giving kids access to it, but it seems figure-out-able.) Tried Quizlet first (http://quizlet.com/) and immediately signed up for it, but then I checked out Flashcard Friends (http://www.flashcardfriends.com/welcome.php) and actually liked it better. It seems more versatile, and you can upload images and sounds to the flash cards for free, whereas on Quizlet you have to become a paying member to do such things. I love that you can add both images and sounds to the cards. Anyway, definitely something I want to make part of my repertoire.

I also signed up for TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/members/myHome.php). It looks like you have to slog through lots of junk to find the videos you'd actually want to use, and I don't know how much patience I'll have for that, but I did pretty quickly find one clip from the John Adams mini-series on HBO, and that made me think that this has possibilities. And for myself, at least, though maybe not for the class, I signed up for "Ta-Da Lists" (http://tadalist.com/). I was skeptical about that at first, but as a major list-maker, the idea of having all sorts of them, short-term and long-term, saved electronically in one place is intriguing. Whether I'll find the time to start making and saving them is another question.

Some other sites were intriguing at first, but then annoying or frustrating in one way or another. I'm interested in the comic strips sites for example, but Toon-Doo's homepage was just confusing and gave no indication of where to start, and Pixton apparently is a paying thing (although I know Elizabeth uses it for 8th grade science -- is she paying thru her class budget?). GoAnimate doesn't say on the homepage whether it's free or not, then implies that it is when you go to register, and then starts talking about something called "Go bucks". I'm sorry, that's just sleazy. Bye bye. And Glogster's homepage seems to be nothing but utterly vague platitudes that give no idea of what you would actually use it for. I was too irritated by that to want to search for specifics.

But hey, at least I found a few things I like. Not easy for a grouch like myself.

Task 5: RSS Distress

Actually, I'm less distressed than I was, though still not convinced that the RSS feed is something I'll like using. I still find it extremely frustrating that Google Reader won't let me delete unwanted stuff. I'd like to only see the new items and the ones I've chosen to keep and read later, and to be able to delete everything else -- just as you can do with e-mail and podcasts and such. Amy had me try Bloglines, which sounded like it might be better, but that hasn't really done the trick either. Actually, it seems to go to the opposite extreme. When I click on one of the sites (or "feeds" or whatever), even if I only open one item there -- or even if I don't open any of them -- if I then go to another site and then come back to the first one, all the items are gone and the feed is empty. Don't know if that makes sense or if I'm using the proper terminology. Anyway, I'm back to just using the Google Reader, but still grudgingly. I wince every time I see all those unwanted articles clogging up the screen.

One of my biggest pet peeves about computer stuff, even before this, has been having to deal with programs or software that won't let me operate the way I want to. For the last year or so, for example, I've been making myself use Word instead of my beloved Appleworks (which I'm told will be disappearing before long) and I absolutely despise Word, mainly because it constantly insists on doing things that I don't want it to do. I've learned how to turn off a lot of the more annoying automatic features, but there are still lots of things it does that I haven't found a way to disable. I know I'm a bit obsessive about wanting to do things in my own way. I can't buy planners or datebooks from a store, for example -- I have to make my own, homemade calendar pages (with Appleworks, of course) and clip them into a binder, because none of the pre-made ones are organized the way I like. I can't stand the idea of using evaluation templates like Power-whatever because they're designed by some software engineer somewhere and look completely impersonal and boring and don't allow for any spark of individuality or personality. I have to design my own evaluations. And I don't use any textbook when I teach history because I have yet to find one I like and would rather just present and organize the information in my own way. Hell, I'm still writing checks to pay my bills each month because I don't like the idea of letting it be done automatically and electronically. So yeah, I know I'm pretty extreme about this. But what I loved about Appleworks (still love -- it's not dead yet) is that it allows me to do things exactly the way I want. Everything that happens as I create a document or graphic happens because I make it happen, not because the software starts doing it on its own. With Word I am constantly trying to undo things that it insists on doing "for me". Anyway, so this Google Reader thing is irritating for similar reasons. I end up yelling at the computer screen like a crazy person because it won't let me do what I want. It's not pretty. I'm not proud of it.

But enough ranting for today. I'm supposed to say if I found any especially interesting feeds. I guess the most promising ones for me are the history feeds. One is from American Heritage (http://www.americanheritage.com/). I've always loved that magazine, but I've never been able to buy an issue without keeping it forever, because there are just too many interesting articles to throw away. I still have issues on my class shelf from 20 years ago. So it's great that I can now collect the articles I want electronically. (If only I could also delete the ones I don't want....) There's a similar feed called "Suite 101: American History Articles" (http://AmericanHistory.suite101.com/), and I think there will be a lot there that I want to save and read. And finally there's one called "BackStory - with the American History Guys" (http://backstoryradio.org/). It's actually a radio program. For each episode there's a summary/intro, and then you can click and listen. From what I've heard so far it seems pretty good. For now this is all just for my own edification. Whether or how I might use these with kids remains to be seen.

I'll keep trying to get used to the Google Reader, or at least make some sort of peace with it. But for now, on to Task 6, at last.