Teach42

Please note, that these are quick notes that I made during a workshop. They have not been edited yet, so please be forgiving!

This the first in a series of notes that I’ll be taking from the conference. This first session is The One Room Schoolhouse: Creating Community in the Digital Age. It’s by David S. Jakes, the IT Coordinator in at Community High School District 99 in Downers Grove, IL.

Looks like the keynote (which I missed because I got lost) is late in ending, so this session is getting started a touch late. Too bad too because it looks like it’s going to be a good one. On the handout he has a list of “Collaboration tools used in [the] presentation”, he has listed: Blogger, Blogmeister, Landmark-Project, Bloglines, Furl, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Wikipedia, Seedwiki, Technorati and Co-link.

Dave Warlick reccomended that I check out David Jakes if I had a chance, and methinks that he made a good reccomendation Looks like this is right up my alley.

Huron Ocunty still has 8 one room school houses
School district’s are 2 square miles, serve 4 familes. (three are wireless)
District in Anrchorage, 24,000 square miles.
In the past, they would have been isolated by geography.
With digital tools, we can link them.
* 10 years ago, community was definited by geography. today it’s defined by shared interest.

Goal: Explore the power and potential of community as a learning environment.
He’s talking about his first community. It’s funny, his first computer had a 40 meg hard drive. He’s sort of laughing about how little that is. My first computer didn’t have a hard drive. I should call my dad and thank him for getting me into computers from an early age.

He’s mentioning spot codes. Basically the same thing as semacodes. Mentions a possilbe use is have them outside an office (freshman advisor) and student can pull up instant access to their information.

Audience puts up hands if they’ve heard of RSS, Blogs, WIkis, Aggregators, Furl, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Tags. There was maybe 30 people in the room. I think I may have been the only one who had heard of Furl. Most people had heard of blogs and wikis, a few knew about RSS and aggregators. But del.icio.us, flickr and furl got few if any hands at all. So how do we get word out?

Do the new tools fundamentally change the way we think about information literacy? Do they change the way we teach kids? (Wasn’t I just blogging about this?)

We need to leverage entertainment time online into instructional time online.

Community defined by eBay: “the power of all of us”
We need to use these tools to tap into the collective power of the web.

Uses Blackboard at his district. The most used tool of it is the discussion boards. Four classes of kids who are all taking the same subject, are all linked together and have a community. They use it to respond to write reflections to questions, have discussions, post audio files, and do peer editing.

Showing a student who didn’t understand the difference between Cyclic and Noncyclic, and both students and teachers can jump in to help explain it.

Surfyourwork.com, similar to blackboard but no charge. Haven’t heard of that one, so I need to check that one out.

The Tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell. How little things can make a big difference. Highly reccomends the book for staff developers.

Communities are networks. Using Will, Dave Warlick and himself as an example of a community. Dave J is connected to Will by some digital tools They have a weak tie together. Dave can see what will reads and writes. He finds new resources through Will. He has a similar connection with Dave W. THe power of it is in the weak ties between them.

He’s now moving on to Flickrgraph as an example of a digital network. Showing how he is linked to people through flickr. Flickrgraph really does serve as a great example of what a digital network LOOKS like. Isn’t there a tool that does a similar thing with Bloglines? Looks like his Flickr account is DJ1.

(I’m so not going to have enough battery life for this conference. I need to get an altoid tin the size of a backpack to supply power to my laptop)

He’s showing us an overview of new digital literacy tools, such as RSS. While showing us RSS, he says that it’s used to publish people’s sites. Someone raised their hand and asked “Published to where?” Isn’t that a fantastic question? Where are we publishing? It’s a fundemental difference between old style publishing and digital publishing. I publish everywhere in the world. It’s up to you to find me and subscribe. Interesting…

He believe that individual sites will be publshing particular pages. Talking about static sites as well, so when content changes, you’ll know about it. Basically like the google RSS search, but supplied by the actual sites themselves.

His bloglines account is djakes. I want to scroll through his public blogroll but appearantly he doesn’t have one Bah, he had a blog listed there called “JakesSpeaks” but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. Does he have his own blog?

He gives a brief overview of blogging and shows both blogger and blogmeister. Moving along to Wiki’s, main idea is that everyone contributes. “Social collaborative website publishing”. Points out Seedwiki for people to try out. Doing a little brainstorming about what we could use Wiki’s for.

Note: Every tool he mentions in this presentation is free.

Moving on to furl. His username on there is also djakes. Think he has a public furl? Yes! He does. Excellent. Bet I’ll find some new reading material in there. Also has a del.icio.us account. Doesn’t look like he uses it TOO much. I’m guessing this is more for example purposes. Didn’t mention the social aspect of del.icio.us, who else has flagged the same site as you. I think that’s a key to both del.icio.us and furl, more del.icio.us than furl though.

Back to flickr. Showing his own feed, he has some fantastic photos of trees and leaves. Very nice. Moving on to Co-Link. Haven’t been on this one before. I don’t get it. Is it basically an auto-hotlink utility? I’ll have to revisit it later.

Showing off the Tag serach in Technorati and that you can subscribe to these searches.

Went to 43things.com, pointed out that a site where people can make lists of what their interests are and what they want to be doing is owned by Amazon.com. Conspiracy?

www.jakesonline.com

Just did my plug for icecasting, I think it went well.

Question and answer: “Safety” question came up. Basic answer is that people are buidling in safety measures.

“Difference between furl and del.icio.us”.

“Have tried them as an Intranet vs. being on the Internet?” No

“Do you have email addresses for students, and are all your courses on Blackboard?” Used to have email for students but shut it down after inappropriate use. Kids now all have their own email outside the school for the most part. Re: Blackboard - If there is a good tool, and teachers can use it to learn, then they will use it. If it makes sense for goods.

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