Rocking out: Using tech tools beyond the classroom

I was asked to send some pictures of local musicians performing during the year 2010 to a producer who is making a short video for a local show we put on each year at The Music Hall in Portsmouth called The Spotlight Awards. (It's a combination Grammys/Oscars to celebrate and cultivate the arts community here.) I had a bunch so I sent them via a music video on Animoto. A big thanks to Chad - who introduced me to this super simple, handy and fun site. Click here if you'd like to see the video:

Tattoo you

I know a lot of us are constantly striving to be a better teacher so in that vein, to help you along, I thought I'd toss out the latest hint science has to offer: Get a tattoo. At least that's the result of a rather small and eccentric research study.
Gives a whole new meaning to teachers and red ink.

Seeing old pictures in a new light, & more

Half of the 10 pages for the Lighthouse Kids website are done. I met with the founder of the organization and she reviewed it and was pleased. Today I re-wrote a press release about a fund-raiser they're hosting in the spring and created a page for it, then I added a page for event guidelines. Had to figure out how to link pages, but Weebly has short, sweet tutorials on just about all facets of the page design, and they came in handy.
 The Lighthouse Kids founder gave me 8 CDs worth of pictures and information, so I have plenty to work with, though lots of the photos are old and blurry.
I took a Lesley webinar on Photoshop Elements yesterday. The topic of it was cleaning up old photos and I learned some  tricks that will come in handy, like rubber-stamping and masking.
Designing the pages brings me back to my days editing when I was laying out an arts supplement every week - it's still so much about reflecting the nature of your product and  creating an impression. It's a balance of style and substance.

If Looks Could Kill - Creating an Attractive Website

Step one to re-creating Lighthouse Kids’ website was considering the look. We’ve all seen sites that are too cluttered, or too cheesy, with pictures that either did not aptly represent the content or that were low quality. We hear the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” all the time, but like monkeys attracted to a shiny stone, we go for the eye-catching cover more often than not. Looks matter.

Before

As we discussed during our last class together, the desire for information is what drives a user to a website, but the packaging of that content can make or break the site.

After

The Lighthouse Kids board wanted to have a clean look that was as easy on the eye as it was to navigate. They also wanted to get rid of an illustrated lighthouse logo as their standing page banner and add a real picture of the White Island Lighthouse.  They agreed with our class’s assessment that the automatic audio opening should be eliminated.

I rifled through my photos from past trips to the island, found some artwork, made a new banner incorporating their slogan, “Do What’s Right, Save the Light,” and went to work, using Weebly for the first time.

Weebly is user-friendly, provides a variety of themes and has recently added lots more fonts to choose from. I went with Arial to keep a crisp look and made sure to incorporate lots of white space.  As a former editor I was dismayed by the amount of spelling and grammatical errors on the current Lighthouse Kids site (For example, it’s a “vicious” storm, not a "viscous" one.) and went to work proofing the copy.  They were paying $250 a year, plus other fees, to a company to create and maintain their site and there were sentences without periods on the end. Looks are important, but so is good grammar – especially when your organization is asking people for money. 

Saving a Beacon of Hope

Having tweeked the kink in my WebQuest to a point where it's not perfect but usable, I've moved on to (queque "Stars Wars" theme music) The Final Project.

As a Rye Elementary service learning representative to Lighthouse Kids', a non-profit organization working to save and maintain New Hampshire's only offshore lighthouse, I'm going to re-build their website. I was talking with the retired teacher who started the program and she expressed frustration with the firm mananging their website in Boston. Her nonprofit pays them a flat fee of $250 a year to host it, then pays extra for the introductory audio on the home page that our class gave a thumbs-down to while reviewing websites, then they pay for any changes during the year because they are only allowed to update half the pages on the site themselves. Also, when they do make changes, often during the transition to publishing odd spacing or symbols appear.

As new as I am to making websites, I'm still optimistic that I can present them with a better option. My goal is to improve its look and readability, give the members of the nonprofit ablility to access the site themselves for updating, and make the whole process less expensive so more $$ goes toward improving the lighthouse. Eventually, I want to add a curriculum page for students and teachers, but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew yet.

Straying from the text book to consider this: NY Times asks is Twitter creating twits?

Thoughts on slogging through my text book: I need basic skills, but this book is too basic. The chapter on using virtual worlds to teach was interesting - I like the creativity involved in creating your own avatars and settings. I still would rather have my child playing outside with other kids and making up scenarios that way, but it's a legit form of digital literacy and composition. There's a line or two that addresses concern about how much time kids spend on computers vs. how much time parents think their kids are on computers. The difference between the two was disturbing, however, like most of the points in this book, the surface was scratched but not mined in detail.

I have noticed a lot more teachers talking about how kids use technology in a negative way, and saw an opinion piece in the NY Times this a.m. that says, it's not just kids. Here's an interesting excerpt that mentions some books on the subject that might pique educators' interests:

"Evgeny Morozov, author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” said Twitter creates a false intimacy and can “bring out the worst in people. You’re straining after eyeballs, not big thoughts. So you go for the shallow, funny, contrarian or cynical.”

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” says technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he said, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways.

“Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,” he said. “If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.”

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, recalled that when he started his online book review he forbade comments, wary of high-tech sociopaths.

“I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,” he said. “Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?”

Why indeed?

Wrapping up Part 1 of "Teaching w/ the Tools..." MP3 players/Netbooks

I was trolling around ITunes U. the other day, and found Maine’s “As We May Teach” podcasts, which were created as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. These podcasts describe ways to use educational technologies and include hands-on examples. (They can be found at: As We May Teach: Educational Technology, From Theory Into Practice ). I found them short, succinct and handy.  Having come across this prior, it stole the thunder from the chapter on MP3 players.  In my case, Brooks-Young is preaching to the converted when she advocates making content like this available to students, and having them create podcasts themselves.  I particularly like the digital literacy skills involved in making script writing accurate & engaging.

The chapter on Netbooks didn’t rock my world either, though I was intrigued by the laptops’ altruistic origins – the One Laptop per Child initiative. I could relate when Brooks-Young points out how some IT staffs rope off student access to the network like they were armed bandits at Fort Knox. At our school, staff is subjected to the same high security/lower productivity mind-set, adding another barrier for those already intimidated or frustrated as they try to make sincere attempts to integrate technology in the classroom.

A most salient point Brooks-Young makes is that automation is not the key to effective use of technology. The novelty of it wears thin in no time. Educators need to come up with new, imaginative ways of approaching instruction to inspire students to develop their innate skills and talents, and cultivate new ones. Again, not a new idea, but one it’s good to be reminded of occasionally.

First I was mad, then I was sad, now I need an interpreter

After putting much thought and effort into my first WebQuest, which hinges on White Island Lighthouse, I posted it Sunday. In the transition, one of the pages came out wrong - a picture jumped over the type and the typeface came out differently. (See the "Task" page at http://djwbohemia.bravehost.com/LighthouseWebQuest/Introduction.html )

I used both the webpage editor's "visual editor" and "text editor" tabs to remedy the situation, but every time I deleted the rogue  picture it stuck like a bug on a windshield. I trolled around for some insight on why this might be happening and found this note:

"Please note, any changes made here will NOT be loaded into the Website Wizard. If you want to edit your pages from here, you'll need to stop using the Wizard to publish, as this would overwrite the File Manager changes."

As a neophyte, I'm not sure what this means, but I think it means I need to make the changes on a Mac. Will try again on another computer and see if I come up with different results, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. Thanks.

"We are becoming a mean culture, and that scares me. It scares me deeply."

Malcom Smith, a life and family policy specialist and associate professor at the UNH, spoke about bullying in Portsmouth last night, and the title here is a quote of his. What he said was distribing. Here's another  quote. "This generation that's coming up, the generation in school right now ... they are the meanest generation of kids that we've ever had, and they have more ways to be mean to each other than any other generation."
It's a short story but here's a link to the article in today's Portsmouth Herald if you want to read more.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20110204-NEWS-102040393
Smith says the issue of bullying is so important that NH's top children's advocay group, the Children's Alliance of New Hampshire, has made bullying its top educational priority for 2010.
Because bullying has become so complex in the digital age, Smith has developed a 16-page pamphlet through UNH's Extention Department. If your school is working on a bullying policy, it's worth checking out:
http://extension.unh.edu/Family/documents/BullyBro.pdf