This is not a complaint about Google pulling the plug on Reader's social features. As awesome as they sound, I only learned of their full capability when bloggers started bemoaning their loss. This is not a complaint about the lack of color in Reader. It's a design scheme, I'm sure I'll adjust. This is a problem of contentI subscribe to nearly 400 RSS feeds. On the average day, these feeds generate about 900 posts. Each day I'm able to see about 70.  Some are images... ...some video... In order to use Google Reader effectively, I have to be able to get to the good stuff quickly. For this I have long relied on Reader's "Sort by Magic" button. I've essentially put my trust in Google to be an expert curator. To notice what I read and what others are discussing. To move important posts to the top and bury the rest. It's something I, and most everyone else, has long trusted Google to do in the arena of search. So when I started in on my "All Items" tab in Reader, it was with great dismay that I found that the curator had taken a day off. In my top 20, over 1/2 the posts were Lifehacker, and 1/4 were posts from Endgadget. Further down I had over 100 posts from FFFFound! broken only occasionally by posts from the Sartorialist. Gone was the mix of research, whimsy and life stories. ...over 1/2 the posts were Lifehacker...Literally yesterday I was debating with fellow teacher Sol Senrick (@solomonsenrick) whether Google Reader or Netvibes is the better platform for consuming RSS feeds. Key to my argument was that I could trust Reader to curate content, allowing me to focus solely on reading. 24 hours later, if we were to rerun that conversation, I'm afraid Sol would convert me. 3 Comments Community, Fun and Learning for Halloween 11/01/2011
Community is important. It must be built with our colleagues and our students. I'm fortunate to have fun-loving peers, and learning-loving students. Still Sorting Email? Why You Should Stop. 10/14/2011
There was a time when folders were absolutely critical in my email workflow. But the past decade has introduced search as the best organizing principle for our lives, a fact which is now empirically established.  A study by IBM Research found that users who search to retrieve past emails spend only 1/3 as much time in their email as users who file email in folders. If you are still using folders to help relocate email later, it's time to let go and let Google (or Windows 7 or Yahoo! Mail) find anything that was ever sent to you. The Promise of Dropbox: Fulfilled 10/09/2011
We had wonderful news at the beginning of the week. Our ePortfolios were ready. As were we. With one of our units of inquiry complete, as well as units of math done, our students were ready to add. Graphs of in class surveys hummed in folders. Voicethreads full of photos collected at school and home through Dropbox await embedding. We began our ePortfolios with a fair amount of direct instruction. I walked my students through:
 With all of the work that we were undertaking, I decided to limit one variable. I asked every student to post and reflect on a recent math assessment. We had the advantage of having reflected on paper and having had conversations at home about this this work. With this piece, students could find fast success. Except... one student who had left his assessment at home. In the moment, with 19 other students working through various stages of uploading their work, I was at a loss. Now, with the ability to reflect (Hey! Reflection portfolios are great for students AND teachers) I know next time I'll simply tell him to choose other work that shows the same learning. As it was, the student set up his portfolio as far as he could and then helped his neighbors through tech issues they were having. He and I talked and agreed that he would bring his work from home and scan it on the following school day. At least, that's what I thought we'd agreed upon. Fast forward a few hours...
Rather than wait for Tuesday morning to continue working on his portfolio, my student has scanned his work and synced it to his (and my) school computer! This is the promise of the cloud. That school is both in the building and in the home. That documents will move seamlessly from location to location. And that skills learned in one context will be applied appropriately even by the youngest of students in 3rd grade. Media Mediates Relationships 10/07/2011
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” He argued that the way our messages are delivered change society more than the content of our messages. Even the lightbulb, empty of any message content, “creates an environment by its mere presence.” McLuhan went further to categorize media by their effect. In one category he placed hot media, those which fostered detachment. In the other category were cool media that compel us to engage completely. Radio was the former. Seminars are the latter. So today we find ourselves with social media, perhaps the “coolest” of all. A site like Facebook or Twitter (or Edmodo or Ning) has literally no content upon creation, yet we engage with them constantly. As Michael Wesch shares below, there’s something in the air. It shapes us, our relationships, and our learning. In the exploration of this new media, let’s begin with a question: You are sitting at home, or in your car or in the atrium of your child’s school. You have just used a computer, tablet or phone to read a blog and watch an online lecture. You’ve been told that changes such as these will radically alter not only your relationships but also your child’s education. What do you do? Tweet me your answer: @Waciuma Eggciting day! And implications... 09/22/2011
What came first, the joy of the teacher or the student? Today it was certainly hard to tell, as my students delighted in their engineering challenge and I in their interactions. My eye opening moment came as I sat down to edit all of these clips together. It was then that I realized that most of the girls in my class had drawn conclusions about the value of teamwork. The majority of physics/engineering conclusions came from my boys. What does this reflect? Brain research, from Hanlon et al. to Nopoulos et al. point to differences in brain development between boys and girls. But
Clearly, there's work to be done. Fittingly, it's the beginning of our unit on scientific investigation. Six weeks into the school year, I'm still investigating who my students are... and who they will become! The Beauty and the Promise of Playgrounds 05/14/2011
Kim Birks, graduate of the School of Visual Arts, gives a history of the playground. From the opening of the first municipally funded playground in America to the proliferation of catalog companies for playground equipment today, what is this curious institution for childhood? Moreover, what can it be? The most cited studies of public playgrounds
are studies of injuries. Do college graduates read? 04/27/2011
Twice today I've run across this same statistic: "42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college." Mental Floss This statistic has the makings of a highly sticky idea, one that we may repeat weeks and months after we read it. What makes it so sticky? For that I turn to the brothers who wrote the book on the subject: Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick.  Using their rubric, we can see that this stat has 5 of the 6 elements of highly sticky ideas.
 We care about reading. And there's a certain cultural feeling, a zeitgeist, that reading is declining. Authors like Nicholas Carr write articles asking "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Carr turned his article into a full length book - I'll admit I only read the reviews) The pervasiveness of television, the internet, and a tweet culture is often decried. So we invest emotion in reading. We worry that reading is on the decline and that gives credibility to stats about poor reading habits. But only 42% of college grads will ever read a book again?! That's unexpected. Simple, concrete and completely surprising. Yup, this idea is sticky. It's also clearly wrong. Some quick research will show that these numbers are so far out of step with published research as to be impossible: After the US census, the General Social Survey is the most frequently analyzed source of information in the social sciences. This trove of data contains revelations about US habits, opinions and beliefs. What does the GSS tell us about American reading habits? In 2002, over 85% of college graduates had read "novels, short stories, poems, or plays, other than those required by work or school" in the past 12 months. Indeed, over 70% of all adults read such works over a year. For those tempted to argue that perhaps these readers aren't reading full books, and are instead simply reading a handfull of short stories, consider this: "sales [of a short story collection] are expected to be one third or a quarter of those for a novel by the same writer." Full length novels are much more popular than plays, poems and short stories. So we need not fear that graduates will never read for pleasure. Perhaps instead we should worry if we will all question, critique and research for pleasure. Only then will we recognize sticky and false ideas run amok! Want to run the GSS numbers yourself? You can! Follow this link. The value of the arts 04/20/2011
Spike Jonze filmed the above video "at an event to bring the arts back into schools". To see the value of arts education, one need only listen to student reactions to this collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and Lil Buck. As this played in my classroom, students marveled at Lil Buck, exclaimed that his dancing was "sometimes ballet and sometimes hip-hop", pronounced that "his body is like spagetti", and added "the cello is the meatball!" These are 8 and 9 year olds that are using metaphor spontaneously. Practicing analytical thinking as they categorize movement by its cultural background. Their wonder was not a departure from academic thinking, but an opportunity to use their academic thinking in the ways we do throughout our lives. A Google a Day is a new daily trivia game that is published in the New York Times and at agoogleaday.com Rather than prohibiting search, the point of the game is to require excellent research skills. Some sample puzzles:
When you click on “Show answer” you are presented not only with an answer, but also with a sample set of searches that would yield the result. (I won’t show those here since I don’t want to ruin any puzzles for you…) I can say, I’m very excited about using A Google a Day in my classroom. I’m constantly looking for ways to teach students how to search well. With the challenge of a game and demonstrations of successful searches, A Google a Day is an excellent teaching tool. | Author3rd Grade Teacher at the American School of Bombay ArchivesSeptember 2011 CategoriesAll |
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