Thing 23

My 23 Things journey has had a very steep learning curve. I have always been considered one ot the techies in my building. When I started teaching at Lowell Middle School ten years ago it was unheard of for a teacher to have a laptop. We had one computer lab in our building and we were still taking attendance on paper and sending it down to the office with a student each hour. I have always tried to stay on top of things as far as technology goes. I will admit though that in the last couple of years I have started to fall behind. I didn't have a google account, I didn't know that RSS feeds were, I knew what a wiki was but never thought I'd be creating and using one myself. I set up a blog once, over three years ago. I posted two updates about my kids then forgot about it. No one else ever noticed which means that no one was wathing it anyway.

I have been intergrating computers into my teaching when I can but I see it as more of a necessity now. I used to view it as more of a luxury. I used to figure that if my students got some computer time it was almost like a bonus. Although there will always be a place for pencil and paper math I need to integrate the use of technology more regularly. I am working on ways to let my students demonstrate their understanding through alternative assessments. There is not reason that the kids couldn't show they know a set on concepts through a powerpoint or a movie. The biggest limitions I see here are time and money. I can't give kids a week of lab time to creat a presentation or movie at this point. And not all kids have access due to their family financial situation. The only way I see it working right now it that if a student wanted to opt out of a test they could prepare an alternative assessment piece of out school. Hardly seems fair though that they have homework just because they are choosing to live in the present and the future. This will be something that I will need to work out over the summer in order to implement in the fall as I move into middle school teaching in the world of web 2.0.

My big take away from this is that being a life long learner is not just something to say to indicate that I read the occasional teaching article. It means that I must continue to be an active participant in the world of technology that is unfolding before us. I will do the best that I can to teach my students not just math skills but also additional technology skills that will make them more prepared for their high schoool years.

I will continue to explore google docs and some of the other web utilities. The RSS reader has changed the way I view the internet. It saves a great deal of time and I will do what I can to teach my students how to use it in their own lives. Something else I have taken from this is the importance of my job as a role model for my students in the digital world. I am "facebook friends" with a lot of former students and even a few current students. I live my life online the same way I do in the real world. I feel that as an educator I can never tell my students enough that once something in on the internet it is potentially there forever. Once you do or say something it cann't be undone. It is my job to make them responsible young adults in my classroom, in the hallways and also in cyberspace.

I have enjoyed the 23 Things and will recommend it to everyone who will listen. It would be a great benefit to our district if all of the teachers were required to complete this program. Thank you to the KISD for making this available to me and to the other participants.

Thing 22

This year our IT department lifted a few of the restrictions that are placed on staff members while on the internet. We are now allowed to access non-school email and we are now also allowed to access YouTube. This was a big change since these things have been completly blocked for years in my district.

I like YouTube and have found many useful videos for my 7th grade math class. Here are just a few that I have used this year or plan to use later in the year.

Pilot Math Linear Functions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9179DB2yG8

The Circle Song 2 - Teaches the Formulas for Area and Circumference of Circles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWDha0wqbcI

Mr. Math does percentages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzoc1SafT94

I don't think I'm ready to put myself out there on YouTube yet but I can see that in order to keep the kids interested it might be worth it to make short movies of things that I teach the same way every year. I would like to spend some time this summer making common craft style videos of various math concepts. If i pull it off I promise I'll share with the rest of the world.

Thing 21

Here's my Twitter experience in a nutshell.

1. Signed up a few months ago.
2. Didn't see the point in it since it is the same as a facebook update. Since I have a ton of friends on facebook and only had 1 person to follow on Twitter I decided it wasn't worth the time or effort.
3. Deleted my account.
4. Found out I was going to need to learn more about Twitter for the 23 things.
5. Reactiviated my account.
6. Signed up to follow a bunch of really important techie teacher types.
7. I still don't use it. I think I have updated my tweet 3 times total.
8. Almost fell for a phishing scam for the first time in my life thanks to a fake direct message in twitter.
9. Saw lots of great links on twitter updates and actually followed some of them. Even found a couple of neat things.
10. Not sure if I want to keep the account or delete it. I only have so many hours in my day and I don't see this taking priority over the many other things I need to do everyday.

I see the value in some of the links that are posted by some of the people on twitter but when I did a twittersearch for "math" I got dozens of posts from kids (I'm assuming high school and college) complaining about how stupid their math teachers were and how much they hate math etc. Not something I need to spend any time on. I also wonder who has the time to be posting links to so may different things throughout the whole day. I found a list of 10 educators to follow on twitter and added them all. It looks like this is all they do with their time. I wonder when they are actually teaching. Maybe they are all technology teachers and get to spend their days in a computer lab with thier students actively engaged in idependent work. Not sure but there is no way I would be posting new and inovative links every 15 mintues to my online personal learning community. As far as use with students goes, it's not going to be an option in my district any time soons since I assume it will continue to be blocked for years to come. If the kids can't access it there is no reason for me to try to work it into my teaching.

Thing 20

I'm all set up on del.icio.us now. My user name is smacdermaid. I imported all of the bookmarks from my laptop into delicious and it took me a very long time to sort through all of them. I spent a few hours looking at the sites I already had bookmarked and added tags. I am sure that my tags are not as detailed now as they will be in the future once I get used to the whole process but i have to start somewhere. I will be using this to share web sites with my winter guard staff as well as with fellow teachers. I can see this being a valuable tool to share information within the math department as well as within my building and also the district. I found a few really good sites that other 23 Things participants had bookmarked in Delicious so this has already been a good thing for me. I can see it making me more productive in the long run since I won't have to email links to myself at school from home and vice versa.

Thing 19

Tagging seems like a great way to sort through a lot of stuff. The more time I spend on the internet and especially since I started working through the 23 things I have found that the number of bookmarks on the computer is getting out of hand. I imported all of my laptops internet explorer bookmarks into my google account but the only real benefit to me is that I can access them both at home and at work. I still have more than 20 folders and I waste too much time digging around trying to remember where I left certain sites.
I think the obvious disadvantage of tagging is the time and effort needed to do it. The advantage is that once the time is put in up front to tag the sites it should pay off later when I don't have to search for things in all of my 20+ folders. As far as things to think about before assigning tags goes if I am going to try to use this as a way to share information with other teachers it will be important to tag things using the same terms that are already being used. I'm going to move on to Thing 20 now and get my del.icio.us account set up so I can move to the Web 2.0 way of bookmarking.

Thing 18

I took some time to look at Ning and also Ning in Education last night and a little after school today. I think that it has potential to be a place for teachers to collaborate but at this point Ning in Education looks pretty small to me. I joined the math group and with me it now has 6 members. I also joined the middle school group and it now has 57 groups. The middle school group has not had any activity since December so it doesn't look like there is much going on there. I have gotten more out of watching other teacher's blogs in the past few weeks that I think I would get out of being on Ning. It's like anything else of this nature though - if people use it, it becomes useful but if there are no people there it isn't. I think a school wiki would be more useful that a School specific Ning in Education. A potential problem is that it could become a place to chat or just flat our complain. Not my favorite thing to this point.

Thing 17

I spent some time with three web 2.0 winners for this task. Here are my thoughts on each of them:
Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/)
I've touched on this in an earlier post. I think google docs has great potential as a means for students to collaborate. I used it for the first time a few days ago. It was nice to be able to create a document at home and then have access at school without having to remember my thumb drive. It was also nice that the file was automatically converted to a .pdf file when I printed it. I wasn't able to find a print preview button which was a little irritating but overall I see this being something that I will be using more and more in the very near future.

Pbwiki http://pbwiki.com/
I am the director of color guards at Lowell Area Schools. During the winter season I have two competitive Winter Guards that travel all over the state to compete. I recently set up a wiki to organize our car pooling efforts. (http://exit52.pbwiki.com/) It's an easy way for the parents to sign up to drive without me having to sort through a whole in box full of emails. The parents are one by one starting to get on board with the new web 2.0 way of signing up to help. I also set up a page within the wiki to coordinate our volunteers for the show we are hosting in February. This event will have somewhere around 800-1000 spectators so take a lot of people to run smoothly. Wikis are already changing the way I do business in my role as Guard Director. I can see putting together research projects for my students in which they will add their thoughts to a wiki to come up with one end result.

My Heritage http://www.myheritage.com/
The last tool that I looked into was My Heritage. It's basically a web based version of Family Tree Maker. I started building a family tree with Family Tree maker last year but found it quite complicated and there were many search elements that were only available if you paid a fee. I didn't get into My Heritage in great depth but it looks neat because I can put in email addresses of the family members that I add and then they get an invitiation to add to the family tree. It looks like it is more or less Family Tree Make meets a Wiki. I'm not sure if I can link a family tree to any of my 7th grade math grade level content expectations or not but it might be something fun for the kids to do on their own.