Matt's Blog

I wasn’t expecting so many cool things today. Firstly, I loved seeing Tinker Plots. I am a die-hard Excel user and I never thought I would see something that can work with data in ways that are so different from Excel. I loved seeing the different plots and graphs and the ways that TP can work with data in visual ways. As a teacher, I don’t know if I have enough data to make it useful (with only 20 students that might not be enough data points), but I’ll definitely plan on keeping it in mind for the future. I think we have TP somewhere at our school, so I’d love to use it with some of my student data.

Given that I don’t give grades, I had never used Turn It In, either. Occasionally I will see that a student has copied something from the internet, but usually it is pretty obvious that it is not 10-year old language and if I need to I can Google it. I enjoyed playing with it and submitting my own paper and seeing what came up. I was interested to see that it noticed that I did copy the summary of each of the Administrator Standards, but what was interesting was that it didn’t notice that it was from the ISTE website, instead it picked out other random websites. It also picked out this phrase as being copied:

with a black and white laser printer and a color laser printer

which I found very odd!

I then copied and pasted a post from my blog, and that came up with a 0% originality score, so even though it was 100% copied from the web, Turn It It didn’t notice. Very interesting!

click to see my score report

So overall a very cool tool, and I will definitely remember that it is on SOCS and use it if I need to.

I was glad to hear about podcasts and see how they are made. Podcasts are something I consume a ton of, but am not involved at all with the creation of. On the listening side, I love podcasts, because as an international teacher, they help keep me connected to some of the news and entertainment that I miss from abroad. I subscribe to podcasts from NPR and ESPN from America, so it helps keep me up to date with US sports and news. Definitely makes me miss home a little bit less.

On the creation side, I’ve done a tiny bit of audio creation, but not much, so it was good to see how easy it is. I can definitely see some ways that kids can really easily add use audio to make some great projects. Teachers do use that at our school, so it’s definitely something I can get into more.

Lastly, I was floored to see this educational technology news from my home state in Massachusetts. Looks like this could really change the way technology is used in schools. It’s a quick read, so do check it out.

Now, gotta finish my other work!

The big highlight of the day today was definitely using Photoshop. I have used Photoshop before to do simple things like resizing photos, but I always thought altering photos was something that took a lot more skill. I never knew it was so easy! Using the liquify tool allowed me to easily and quickly change the appearance in ways that looked pretty realistic. I was shocked and amazed! I’m sure there are a ton more tools that really are complex and difficult to use, but it’s amazing how you can still do some pretty powerful stuff so easily.

I also really liked using the pivot tables, as I haven’t done those since college. It was definitely a bit confusing at first, but if you can master it, it must be an easy way to keep track of a large amount of data. I will try to find some uses for that in the upcoming year at school. One of my goals is to try to do a better job of keeping track of student data and using that to inform my instruction, so there may be some good ways to use a pivot table to do so.

Overall, I think Excel is an amazing powerful tool and I use it all the time in my teaching to make things easier and quicker. I can’t even count the number of times that I have used it to organize my grades and other data.

As we get closer to the end of the course I am starting to think about all the tools we have learned and which one or two I might really take to my classroom. I’ll be thinking about that tonight and will hopefully add some thoughts tomorrow.

Another day down and Friday is getting close (gotta keep working on my final presentation)! I was surprised that the thing that was perhaps most meanigful for me today was learning about Wordle. This was surprising because I’ve known about Wordle for quite a long time, but I never could really figure out how you could make it useful. Sure it’s interesting and looks kinda cool, but it was nice to finally hear about some ways you can use Wordle to actually learn something. I love the idea of putting papers or pieces of writing into Wordle to analyze them. I’ve got a few ideas for things my students could do next year to use Wordle:

- Use their reading log and type in the genre of each book they’ve read and see which are largest. This will help them understand what genres they tend to read and which ones they maybe could work on reading more of.

- Also, I’d love to use this for the students’ portfolios. They could make a Wordle of important things they’ve learned or of highlights of the year.

- They could definitely use it in a social studies or science project to record their learning.

I also put in my own blog into Wordle to see what would happen. Here’s what my blog looks like from Wordle’s point of view:

My blog as a Wordle

I don’t know if it teaches me a whole lot yet. I think I need to get more content on the blog first!

In summary, though, it was helpful to see this tool again through some different eyes. Learning from the other people in class has been really helpful (I was also excited to get an email from our tech director today that said they were in the process of setting up Google apps accounts. I don’t know who these are for or what their plans are, but it gives me hopes we could do something like the curriculum mapping we saw yesterday).

I enjoyed learning about digital images and digital cameras too, as those are things I know a little about, but my knowledge is more in the application rather than the theory. Especially with digital cameras, my knowledge is lacking, so it was good to find out about how they work, how many megapixels you need, and what the different kinds of zoom are.

I look forward to working with photoshop and learning how to really work with digital photos. It’s something I’ve done a little bit of before, but I’m sure there’s a lot to learn.

Finally, with all this Web 2.0 work, I thought of one more tool that I use that I would like to share on my blog, so I’ll hope to post about that later.

Wow,  I can’t believe it is day 5 already! We’re really moving and have covered an unbelievable amount.

some of my feeds

I enjoyed the discussion on RSS today, even though I am relatively familiar with it, as it is something I feel very strongly about. It has completely changed my professional and personal life. Now, my Google Reader page is the homepage on my browser and I am constantly checking it. I have always loved to read and being able to connect with so many different people and sources through the RSS aggregator has been amazing. I keep up to date on everything from educational technology, to how to teach writing, to movie trailers, to college football news. I love that it makes me feel like anytime something new is happening I’ll know about it soon because someone I am following will blog about it. I think keeping a feed reader is some of the best professional development that any teacher can take part in (I just wish more did). I would wonder about how any school administrators have been able to encourage more of their staff to keep a feed reader, and if that has worked.

I was amazed to see how YIS has used Google Docs to organize their curriculum online. I would love if our school could manage something like that. We are currently using Atlas Rubicon for curriculum management, however the implementation has not been nearly as successful for us. People have a hard time using the tool, and therefore it does not get used very often. What I love about Google Docs is that even though it is so powerful and has so many features, it is based on something that is familiar to everyone, a Word Document. I think that if we were able to move to something like that it would be more successful because there is a part of it that feels so familiar. I will definitely look for some opportunities to suggest this to our Director of Curriculum.

I am interested in finding out more about the integration of email and calendars with google apps, as that is something that I haven’t used before. Right now I use iCal for my calendar, which I am happy with. I also use gMail and my school email (through Zimbra), but always have them open in two separate browser windows,. Plus I have a Google Reader account, so when I saw that most of that could be combined through either Google or Mac Mail, I was surprised. I will have to look into that more to see if it is worthwhile to make a change.

Finally, I’m definitely looking forward to hearing clarification on the final project. The first part was pretty easy, but the second part (regarding the standards) is a little less clear. I’m having a hard time seeing how I would comment on the standards besides just “we don’t do that.” For example, with the first standard I don’t think we have shared vision of technology usage. So I can say we don’t have that, but I’m not sure where to go besides saying, “we should have one.” Any clarification or examples would be appreciated.