Teach42

A little humor to start off the work week!

Tuesday I was lucky enough to be a guest on the Women of Web 2.0 podcast. Here’s a link to the conversation, both audio and text chat.

I gotta admit, I was trying to focus in on the conversation and completely missed the text chat during the bulk of the podcast! So I was fascinated to read through the dialogue that was taking place while I was babbling away. Not only that, but I was way impressed with Cheryl and Sharon who managed to moderate the chat, host the conversation and deal with technical difficulties, all without missing a beat. Quite an impressive juggling act!

A huge thanks to the Women of the Web for inviting me to chat with them!

In the continuing saga of The World is Really Really flat, I checked out WizIQ today. Basically it’s a Web2.0 tutoring service. I’ve seen these before, and there are others that were much more impressive from a user interface perspective. But WizIQ caught my eye for a reason that really had nothing to do with the site itself.

When I did a search for math tutors, 9 out of the first 10 people listed were in India. At first I thought that was too bad, because when I think tutoring, I think of an elementary student hunched over the kitchen table as some college kid or teacher attempts to get him to understand difficult algebra concepts. Is that basically what was in your head too?

Then I started thinking about the flat world. Why on earth does my tutor need to be in the same room as me? Heck, combine Skype with some digital whiteboarding and concept mapping and you’ve got a great Web 2.0 recipe for a tutoring session for no cost whatsoever.

Instead of drawing upon the pool of people that can drive to your house, you can draw upon a global pool of educators. Of course time zones can be an issue, but that can always be worked around.

I’ll be the first to admit it, there’s no tutor like a teacher you already know and trust. But if you’re going to the web to try to find a tutor, then why restrict yourself to people close to your geographical location?

How many versions of this video have there been? Supposedly this is the final version, and once again its tearing up the YouTube charts. Anybody have any idea what’s different this time?

While I’ve never been a big fan of versioning (allowing for a .1, .2, 1.5 release etc), but this seems like a classic example of why YouTube should implement it. Sometimes these just aren’t final drafts, and having 3 or 4 versions of the same video is just confusing.

Well, I wasn’t going to mention this beyond a tweet, but what the heck. Blogger’s Choice Awards are going on right now, and yes they do have an education category. What I like about this awards site is that you can vote for more than one weblog. And since you need to register to vote, there’s at least some sense of accountability. For example, you can look me up and see all the blogs that I voted for so far.

Don’t see one of your favorites? No worries, you can always nominate them. So when you have a few minutes, visit the Blogger’s Choice Awards. Oh yeah, and while you’re there you can throw me a vote!

Dean Shareski has got a great way to explain the whole “professional development via RSS” idea.

I’ve recently assembled a team of researchers who go out on a daily basis and find out what’s happening in the world of digital learning and education in general. This team is comprised of teachers, consultants and experts who really know there stuff. Some live in China,New Zealand, Scotland, United States and Canada. They send me their findings in an instance. Some will even call me to discuss their findings. If there are questions, I can get clarification and often leads me to others who are also working on the issue. They are relentless.When I wake up in the morning, I’m always amazed that the work they’ve done. Sometimes it’s too much but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The best part about my team is they are free. Many organizations would be thousands of dollars a month for this type of work. I’ve been able to compile this team for nothing. All they ask is that I also share my work and allow them to consider me a researcher as well. So far, it’s been working very well.

Love the analogy, and love the image he’s scrapped together in Photoshop.

SO, who’s doing your research for you as you work, play or sleep?

I really think that Teach42 needs a new theme, and am loathing the project. I’m just not all that good at making things pretty! I know I want to keep the general logo that a friend of mine created, but besides that I’m pretty open. So open, that I’m going to open it up to the general community.

If you or your students are artistically and technologically inclined and want to come up with a WordPress theme for this blog, then let me know! I’d be proud to shift my theme to one created by a reader or student of a reader.

Here’s my specs:

Heh, I think that’s about it. If nobody bites, then I’ll just have to hitch up my sleeves and do it the old fashioned way. Feh.

I remember back in my glory days at the University of Iowa, when I was getting my bachelor’s in Elementary Education, I only had to take one technology class. The final project was to send and receive email. No, I’m not joking. As you might be able to guess, I already knew how to do that. I wanted to learn how to create my own web pages. (Just to put things in perspective, this was shortly after modems hit 56kb, so the web had images, but high speed was ISDN and really high speed was dual ISDN.)

I was doing a community service project for a different class. I thought that instead of ‘learning’ how to send and recieve email, I could create an online portfolio for the project. While neither teacher really had any idea how I would be doing it, they gave me the green light and away I went. My first HTML web pages, my first online portfolio, and an experience that has contributed to the path that led to the career that I’m in now when you get right down to it.

The reason I share that little story is because neither teacher had any idea how to build a web page, and yet once they understood what I was trying to accomplish, they supported me in my endeavors. They didn’t need to tell me how to do it, they just needed to have an open mind.

A friend of mine forwarded me on what just might be the best marketing site for a book that I have ever seen. Take a minute to read through it. It won’t take any longer than that.

It’s brilliant. It’s eye catching, and yet incredibly simple. Low tech, and yet high tech at the same time. It makes a point in a very whimsical way and while it may not look like much, it obviously took a great deal of time to create (think about the books and the matching shirts).

So my question to you is, if a student came up to you and told you that instead of doing a book report, they wanted to create a website using images drawn on a refridgerator, would you let them? Encourage them? Push them to go beyond pencil and paper, or Microsoft Word for that matter? Would you allow them to create an animation to represent what they’re learning in Geometry instead of doing 30 practice problems? To create a digitial story about the Boston Tea Party instead of memorizing the date it occured?

Is there space in your classroom for innovation?

Over the years I’ve gotten some really touching emails from people who have told me how much they enjoyed reading this blog, listening to the podcasts and seeing me speak. I truly can’t express just how much those have meant to me.

And if I were a SMART person, I would have kept those emails, so I’d have a great library of testimonials to draw upon when people ask for them. Unfortunately, they’re all buried in the 1.4GB of email that i have buried in my GMail account and I can’t seem to find the search terms to magically make them arise from the archives.

So I have a favor to ask of you. If you have ever seen me present or enjoy what you read or listen to hear, would you mind writing me a brief testimonial? Nothing fancy, just a honest sentences. I’d greatly appreciate it.

You can leave them as a comment, or email me. There are three places they may be used: 1) On a testimonial page that I’ll add to this blog, 2) On my CV if I ever get around to updating it and 3) On a page listing my presentations for Discovery.

Thanks in advance! And if anyone has any tips for going through 1.4 GB of email, let me know

I’m in the middle of putting the finishing touches on a presentation that I’ll be doing on Wednesday afternoon about integrating widgets into unitedstreaming‘s assignment builder and quiz builder. It occurred to me that like many of my other presentations, it will probably be almost completely worthless on its own. I always have people who ask me for my presentations, and I’m happy to pass them along. However, for the most part my presentations are little more than visuals to emphasize the things i’m speaking about. Take away the audio and you really just have a bunch of random images.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of text heavy PowerPoints. However, there is certainly one thing to be said for them, and that’s that they can be emailed to somebody else. Or they can be shared with something like Slideshare. They can stand on their own two legs, even without me being there.

So I guess my question is, is there actually two different skills we should be constructing here? Presentations that will be presented with a human voice, and ‘mute’ presentations?

Or is that question moot, considering how easy it is to create screencasts. And the real key is to create a screencast for every presentation, so THAT can be shared instead of just the PowerPoint.

What do you think? Is the art of creating a ‘mute’ PowerPoint worth teaching?