Geezers Rock

Library Thing 16

scasart — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:38:07 +0000

What a delightful discovery! I will share it with my sister-in-law, a librarian, and her twin daughters, who grew up among books–as soon as they all recovery from their installation at Harvard this week. See where reading can take you! Alas, my reading days have been on hold until retirement; there was a time when I would have visited this site regularly for suggestions, comments, etc. My teaching career has led me away from literature; now it’s speech and writing–although I connect to literature whenever and however I can. Yes, I tagged this site and will return to it.

Yum! Thing 15 is Delicious!

scasart — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:11:48 +0000

Finally! It’s as promising as I thought it would be and will solve the problems I had all summer of using any available computer. I tagged two sites I know I’ll want to share with colleagues and maybe students: one which we viewed early in the course on why Web 2.0 matters, and one on the social media revolution. Great visual representations with eye-popping stats! I played with the Delicious site and found other interesting things to explore later. I also figured out it helps to know the user name of any colleague whose tags/sites you’d like to see. We may need to set up a directory if enough of us buy into this way of sharing.

No Frills: Thing 14

scasart — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:51:51 +0000

Went to wordle.net and made a great poster from MLK’s “Dream” speech; will do the same for JFK’s inaugural address. My students study both speeches. Great graphic reinforcement of key concepts! I copied the other sites to explore later. I will set up Skype next week to talk to my nieces at Harvard.

Life/Summer’s Too Short: Thing 13

scasart — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:58:52 +0000

OK, speeding up here. Went straight to Chris Betcher’s on-line presentation about Delicious. I’m in a hurry to reach Thing 15 because I’ve heard so many good things about it. Chris helped me become comfortable with a term I’ve been seeing more often recently, cloud computing. Sorry, no helpful links in this post as I hurry to the next Thing on the list–and school resumes tomorrow! Good luck to all of us!

Looking for Lisa: Thing 12

scasart — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:40:45 +0000

Good grief, that took 7 hours! I found over 30 great parodies of Mona Lisa and kept track of the info needed for attribution, but since we were supposed to use only Creative Commons images, I had to use just 10 of them and contort the little story I wanted to tell. I hope I can embed it here! Hey, it worked! Cool! Now I have to put in all the attributions. I wish I could figure out how to put them UNDER the slide show, but my brain is fried, so here they are:

1. Mona Lisa – Louvre from Scott MacLeod Liddle; http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottliddle/95717731/sizes/m/

2. monalisa 3D from volvidejapon http://www.flickr.com/photos/volvidejapon/3629291675/sizes/m/

3. Gioconda Otherwise ² from *The Boy From Cerrado http://www.flickr.com/photos/goliveira/272472472/sizes/m/

4. The Mona Keamsa from keamysparadise http://www.flickr.com/photos/keamysparadise/2661760345/sizes/m/

5. Grandma Pearl as Mona LIsa from Bill Gracey on the road http://www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/672232269/sizes/m/

6. Pinocchio Restaurant Portland,…from drburtoni http://www.flickr.com/photos/84346589@N00/3358262351/sizes/m/

7. I want my life back! from spoedman http://www.flickr.com/photos/spoedman/158813522/sizes/m/

8. Panda Lisa from ulrichp http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulrichp/12660835/sizes/m/

9. Monalisa! from jampa http://www.flickr.com/photos/jampa/463394186/sizes/m/

10. Monalisa from gautamnguitar http://www.flickr.com/photos/gautamnguitar/2868765780/sizes/m/

CC PS–Looking for Mona Lisa (Thing 11 continued)

scasart — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:47:39 +0000

It wasn’t as easy as I thought to search and especially to attribute correctly a series of Creative Commons images of Mona Lisa I found during an hour-long foray.

Let’s see if I can do it here:

Well, it took a few tries, and I don’t think I got it by using the embedding icon, but rather by the old cut-paste routine. I’ll have to keep trying. And now the formatting is all jammed up for the text. Boogers.

Flittin’ around Flickr: Thing 11

scasart — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:36:28 +0000

I could easily spend entire days exploring, but want to record one journey I took:

Starting at Dan Meyer’s blog, I followed the comments on his Chicago Hope post and ended up watching a Swedish anthropologist give one of the most exciting lectures I’ve ever heard/seen; it ended with a plea for free, unfettered access to statistical information and tech tools to make them intelligible for all people. I’ve already e-mailed the link to our history department chair to share with our economics teacher, but such information can add a dimension to almost any course.

And I’m not done exploring yet! More later

Creative Commons–Cool! Thing 10

scasart — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:27:00 +0000

My colleagues and I have always shared our lessons; computers have made it easy to adjust them to suit our individual needs and preferences. But now the internet is making it possible to share with a much larger teaching community. If anyone out there would like access to my plans and lessons, I’m happy to have others benefit from my efforts. I am also eager to see what other teachers are doing and hope they will share too.

One of the best things about teaching is that so many smart and generous people go into education. The best parts of workshops are the few moments set aside for participants to talk to each other. I always find myself impressed and delighted by the colleagues in my department, other departments, and other schools.

We’re an independent school so we don’t have to subscribe to any canned curriculum or textbook series. We design much of our own material. It takes time and work. If someone else has already done much of something I’m about to re-invent, it would be nice to know it so I don’t need to start from scratch. And if I can save someone else some work, I’ll happily do so.

But let’s not let the publishers take this over for profit. Let’s find each other on-line and carry on our own conversations.

So anyone teaching high school English, writing, speech–give me a shout!

Suzanne Casart
secasart@iolani.org
or maybe we’ll find a wiki where we can work together . . .

And then we’ll worry about the other huge problem we all face: finding time to make this work.

PS. It took too long to open the most promising sites under the stretch task–and some sites were down–but I’ll try again later.

A Little Wiki

scasart — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:23:11 +0000

It’s not much, but it’s my first wiki. Take a peek:

More later!

Not so wiki–yet! Thing 8 with stretch

scasart — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:46:13 +0000

Again I discovered these “meta” sites with cool links to others, which I will list below. However, I was disappointed to find I either could not get deep enough into sites to see what students actually said, or found they said nothing amazing or showed little creativity in the way they used the wiki. Still, I trust Vicki Davis’s comment that the students were excited, speaking their own language and using tools they felt comfortable with.

My first stop ended up taking me all kinds of places. What fantastic energy and enthusiasm Jennifer Barnett brings to her history and English classes! What generosity in sharing sites and advice with fellow teachers! One reassuring comment from Jennifer:

“There was a huge learning curve early on requiring some of my own time (a lot at first) to master web 2.0 tools. Now, it’s very easy. Most everything on the web that I use in my classroom works basically the same way. Be patient early on and ask for help when you get stumped. The world of educational technology is full of people ready to help you.” (OK, I pasted from a file I saved as Plain Text, and now I seem to have shifted fonts for the rest of this post. I can’t see a way to change fonts IN this window. Guess I should write my entire entry elsewhere, then paste it here and add the links. Next time!)

I also followed the Flat Classroom link and explored a bit, coming across great images purporting to give a history of the US in 4 minutes, set to a catchy tune. I need to check whether the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are the original ones; either way, they’re synched nicely with images that aren’t history, but rather memories, for me.

This site is also where I found a link to a bunch of videos that might come in handy.

I think maybe a wiki could be a way for my Creative Nonfiction Writing students to participate more fully in discussions of sample essays I assign. I’ve been able to find the full text for some of them on-line and thought I could post one, then give guidelines for the sorts of things I want to train them to look for and perhaps imitate. The essay I start with, because it’s short and given in the essay collection we use, 50 Essays from Bedford/St. Martin’s (ed. Samuel Cohen), as the sample for active reading note-taking, is Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” It’s far from easy in its diction, and a good example of the sort of questioning that essays often do.

To make the essay more accessible to my students, I can make links to define words they usually don’t recognize, insert a picture of rooks (none in Hawaii!) and maybe the kind of moth she seems to have in mind, highlight the personal pronouns (which shift in interesting ways), and provide a bit more biography than the book does. I may be able to find (and include a link to) a film or audio clip of this or some other Woolf essay; I think I’ve seen one for “A Room of One’s Own.”

That’s where I went on Wikipedia: Woolf’s biography. I’ve used Wikipedia before, and even had a student write a convincing essay on its increasing validity and the merits of common/shared knowledge. This site was a good example of a work in progress, with invitations to provide additional information and citations where they were missing, and disclaimers about some of the information. I like the bibliographies usually included. They provide constant reminders to students to document their sources to avoid plagiarism.

I probably won’t use the Wikipedia bio, though; it includes details on sexual orientation and abuse that aren’t necessary to understand the essay, and may be distracting or troubling to my students. They can discover it on their own if they want to know why she was suicidal. I’m sure I can find a milder bio somewhere.

So am I going to try this for Thing 9? I’ll look at it tomorrow. I’m kind of excited to try it!