Monthly Archives: September 2008

My Man Crush on Google

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I love Google.  There, I’ve admitted it.  Just about every part of Google is great- GoogleMaps, Google Earth, Google Images, Google Video, Google Blog Search, Sketchup, GoogleReader, GMail, GoogleDocs – Everything (well, except for Google Toolbar which is absolutely wretched when it ends up on one of our student’s laptops.)  To me, Google is like my favorite restaurant: just about everything on the menu is good and they just keep coming out with better.  The big difference: for the most part, the great tools that Google offers are Free (the old college beer philosophy still applies: cheap is good, free is better.)

So, in proper form, these are a few of my favorite things:

1.  Everything GoogleEarth.  Whether it be Earth or Sky, GoogleEarth has it all.  You can email Google and get free GoogleEarth Pro licenses for your teachers (allows you to take high res pics, make video, runs a little faster), add all sorts of layers, and take you students on virtual fieldtrips of space and the Arctic when they otherwise would never be able to.  Some great sites include GoogleLitTrips which has layers that take you on walking tours of literature, do math lessons with RealWorldMath.org,  not to mention with the GoogleEarth plugin you can play great timewasters such as Monster Milk Truck!

2.  GoogleMaps has use greater than just finding the closest Chinese buffet.  With the addition of Street View, GoogleMaps can be used to take walking tours of cities such as Paris, San Francisco, Memphis (TN), and more.  I’m here! is a neat application that allows you to “tweet” (for those non-Twitter people, such as myself, here’s what a “tweet” is) but also give a location as to where you are and plot it on Google Maps.  Even more intriguing is the mobile version.  Being that I’m a bit of a history/archaeology junkie, these sites caught my attention as well: The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land and (UK) Online Archaeology.

3.  Keeping up with Google through different blogs is a great way of keeping up to date on software that is always changing.  There are some great blogs out there that cover GoogleEarth, GoogleDocs, and more.  Here’s a couple of one’s I tend to keep up with: Google Earth Hacks, Google Sightseeing, Ogle Earth, GELessons, Google Lat Long Blog, Google Earth Blog, and many more.

What did I say?

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I’ve been working on ways to teach style to young writers and I’ve been given a few great ideas over the years.  Keep in mind, I am by no means an expert- my Creative Writing degree helps me to justify my lack of grammar knowledge by obligating me to bend the rules in creative ways.  Sure, a basic understanding of the rules is necessary, but that’s about it.  My lack of grammar knowledge stems from a learning issue that I suffered from when I was younger: laziness.  Granted, there are many learning differences that cause students to suffer through agonizing years of trying to learn in an environment where they just don’t function the same as others.  I suffered through my own learning disability (at least that’s what it was called when I had it, although not quite as PC to call it that now) for years, but when it came down to the point where I had to learn to write correctly, I ended up teaching myself just enough and then skid by.  In the end my struggle with a learning difference led to (but did not cause or justify) my laziness.

So, here’s what happened: I had transferred schools and found myself in a much more academically challenging independent school my Junior year of High school.  I had skirted by on my creativity for years, but when I was faced with my first term paper I was told “You have the manual, start reading.”  I read just enough to get through that paper.  When it came time for me to chose a major, I focused in my Creative Writing- something I could do because it was how I’d taught myself to succeed.  After graduation, I became a teacher and then had to decide how to best go about teaching my students to write.  My goal was to show my students how to think, not teach them what to think, and then translate that into a cohesive argument and put that on paper.  I may not be able to teach them the mechanics of grammar, but (in my opinion) I could at least show you how to put those thoughts on paper effectively.

So now the question is, how do we teach effective rhetoric to our students?  As we have more and more digital kids coming up who are texting and IM’ing more often than they are practicing a “5 paragraph essay”.  We’re dealing with kids who if the word doesn’t have a red squiggle under it then it must be spelled correctly.  These are the kids we’re trying to get to sit down and write in-class essays.  They can’t spell, their grammar is horrid, punctuation is pathetic, and organization is non-existent.  How then do we get them to put their thoughts onto paper?

Here’s two ideas to jump start the “thinking process” but it may not help much in the grammar department:

1.  Small Sentences, Big Pictures.

Use a website like The Boston Globe‘s The Big Picture to inspire students to write.  Have the student start by writing short effective sentences.  Write one really good descriptive sentence about a picture.  Then move to two, then to a paragraph, then to 250 words, and so forth.  If you want your students to be frustrated and disappointed, have them write a paper at the beginning of a semester.  If you want the students to be proud of what they’ve created, move in slowly.

2.  Send your paragraph to the clouds.

Use a website like Wordle to create a tag cloud of the student’s paper.  Have the students type a paper and copy it into Wordle.  The site will generate a tag cloud (the one above is of my Delicious account).  This way the student can see what words they are using more often.  If a word appears more often that seems week or has nothing to do with their essay, they know they need to re-direct.

What are your ideas?  I’ll look for a few better ideas, and pass them on.

The Musical Shift

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Over the summer I gave a session at the Laptop Institute on the effect that technological advancement has on ethics as well as how ethics then affects technological advancements.  One example I gave was with music:  in the late nineties, there was a technological boom on the internet.  This boom led to Napster and others to thrive on the sharing of digital music illegally.  This mass unethical behavior led to a crackdown on Napster and other users but also led to the music industry realizing that digital music was here to stay and there was no use in fighting it.  So, instead of trying to beat the file sharing epidemic, they decided to play along and begin selling music at an affordable cost (I can buy an album off iTunes for $5 less than it costs in the stores).

What’s even more interesting is a by-product of this.  No longer can a musician have two good songs on an album (wow, how old do I sound?).  Back when I was younger, I’d wait to hear at least two good songs off an album before I’d purchase the whole thing (after all, they never played those bad b-sides on the radio).  Now, I can preview an entire album and choose whether to purchase a couple of songs for a couple of dollars or the whole album if it’s worth it.  This encourages artists to release better quality albums- not like some of the garbage I have on cassette in the top of my closet.  I do have to wonder- what will happen to all those compilation album companies when I can create my own compilation and burn the playlist from iTunes?

Now, it’s not a perfect system.  After all, according to the Times Online, the average teenager has over 800 illegal songs on his or her iPod.  If you go by their math that the average digital music player has 1770 songs, then at least 48 percent of all the songs on digital music players are illegal.  Of all the kids laptops that I see I have noticed LimeWire (filesharing/ P2P software) on just about every one of them (or at least on everyone of those that are having software problems- go figure.  Even with all of this illegal music still a prevalent thorn in the music industry’s side, there is a relatively new and even more impressive shift occurring.

By now you either know about the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series or you’ve been living in a hut in the barren plains of Africa.  I love video games and for the first time my wife has found a video game that she can take me to the cleaners on.  It is fun, addictive, frustrating, and at times, humiliating (especially Rock Band and the newest Guitar Hero World Tour which ask you to sing.)  The premise of the game:  play along with the music “strumming” your little guitar – which is only slightly larger but much cooler than Tiny Tim’s ukulele.  One of the really cool advancements is that you can purchase more music for the game and some artists are beginning to release full length albums to the games when they release their music as CDs and to iTunes.  (Ironic how Metallica, the band that so vehemently went after Napster and Napster users for stealing their music is now the first to release a full album for Guitar Hero III and World Tour- I guess there’s a dollar to be made.)

According to Entertainment Weekly there is a shift in the way music is being viewed simply because you can now download music into your video games.  This new-found respect for the recording industry may last until users determine the best way to hack into and share these downloaded albums, but it does pose a couple of neat issues.  For example, will albums be available exclusively for games and will there be more portability between the interactive music (not just music being listened to on your and in the background of your games.)  It’s an interesting phenomena, but for now, I need to go practice if I’m ever going to be as good as this kid…

Looking for alternatives

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We, like many K-12 schools, face an interesting dilemma when it comes to making the web useful for our teachers.  When you are a multi-divisional school, how do you adapt technology usage for lower school as well as upper school kids without leaving out the fact that you also have middle school kids using it as well? Not to say that one division’s needs are any greater than another, each divisions needs are equally important, just different. So, for example, what upper school teachers may need is a repository for handouts, interactive wikis and blogs that help foster discussions and build upon the materials discussed in class. Lower School, on the other hand, needs Newsletter options- places to house images of events in the classroom so parents can see what is going on in the classes. When our school went to a new website, we were faced with this dilemma especially in what to do for Lower School so they could send out pictures without having to flood parent email boxes with gigs and gigs of data

My solution: Zoho.  Personally, I love Zoho.  It’s a great setup with many possibilities.  GoogleDocs is great (don’t get me wrong), but I love Zoho.  I think its the Notes feature (my favorite Office product right now is OneNote- I keep my life together with OneNote!)  Here’s the little presentation I put together for my Lower School teachers to see how to save a presentation to send out to their teachers:

My point is this (as if I ever really had a point…) sometimes adapting what is already out there is better than finding something new and re-inventing the wheel. By adapting software that is primarily used for presentations, teachers can send home neat little newsletters that they can share and work collaboratively on.

Will work for fancy new title…

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Lately I’ve been contemplating my title- Assistant.  This is actually the first time in five years that I’ve kept the same title for more than one year.  It seems strange; I’ve gone from religious studies teacher to Adjunct Instructor of Religious Studies and Ethics to Technology integration Specialist to Web and Graphic Media Specialist to Infrastructural Technology Specialist to my current Assistant Director of Technology and all the sudden I get to keep my title for another year.  But I’ve been thinking about what it actually means to be someone’s “Assistant”.  I figure there are three types of assistants:  The Beatles, Robin and Igor.

The Beatles are arguably one of the greatest bands of all time.  Whether or not you like their music, you cannot deny the impact that they had on the evolution of music and the explosion of popularity Rock and Roll experienced from their hard work.  The Fab Four worked together as partners to create some of the most memorable music of all time.  After their breakup in 1970, many of the Beatles had successful solo careers but nothing as popular or as powerful as what they had as a team, assisting one another in success.

Robin was a superhero- maybe not quite a super as Batman, but a hero none the less.  He lacked the powers that superheroes such as Superman had, but he had access to the arsenal of gadgets that made Batman feared by villains.  He never got the full credit for saving the day but he also didn’t have the full responsibility of saving the world on his shoulders.  He was able to say goofy lines, do his job, assist in saving the world but in the end was still an assistant- not a co-hero.

And then there’s Igor (pronunciation differs depending on whether you come from the school of the Son of Frankenstein or Young Frankenstein).  Digging up bodies, savaging for parts, hunched over in servitude.  He gained no respect for the work he did, but then again he didn’t demand respect either.  Igor is the seemingly mindless servant whose only job is the task at hand never pushing or advancing forward, only getting the job done.

So now I wonder, where do I fit in?  Am I a Beatle, Robin, or am I Igor?  Do I work just for the sake of getting the job done, or do I push forward trying to advance my position and leverage my way into something more?  Is there a balance of working as a team player without having to be walked all over or walking all over everyone else?  I have no answers, really, but I do wonder…

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(fictional_character)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles
http://www.beatles.ws/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072431/ (Young Frankenstein)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031951/ (The Son of Frankenstein)

Writing Papers Good…

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Let me say on the front end that technical writing and I aren’t the best of buddies.  I am the comma splice master.  It’s like I’m playing Yahtzee with a cup full of commas- I shake them up, pour them on the paper and count them as they lie.  Sure, my undergrad was in English, but it was in creative writing.  Basically I stink so bad at those grammar rules that I had to major in the artistic justification for breaking the rules!  One thing my Creative Writing degree taught me was that the rules, when used appropriately, can help to shape the creative structure of an essay.

We spend time in school teaching the basics- where to capitalize, where to punctuate, how to make a 5 paragraph essay, but we often neglect the art of writing a strong paper- the art of rhetoric and poetics in regards to essays.  Fundamentals are important- learning your grammar rules such as how to avoid comma splices and correct usage of there, their, and they’re are key to writing intelligently.  I gave an essay exam to my New Testament Studies class where one of the answers should have been a page long.  One student gave an answer that was a page long but only two sentences- two very long, run-on sentences.  The answer was spot on correct but it took a half hour to translate his train of thought.  Had he used punctuation correctly I would have been able to follow his essay more easily.  Punctuation helps us to know when to breathe, when to pause (either momentarily or dramatically), and it helps us to develop the poetic rhythm of the work.

Learning the technical fundamentals is the first step to effective essay writing.  Learning style- strong rhetoric, poetics, and structural formation will build upon those basic rules and help our students write more effectively and persuasively.  I’ve put together a few of my style suggestions (they’re not really rules since they are in no way authoritative or absolute!):

  1. Quotes:  only use quotes that strengthen your statement, not just to take up space.  Use quotes within strong statements to make your essay stronger.
  2. Why use similes when metaphors work much better.  Why say something is like something important when it is something important?
  3. Weak words make for weak arguments.  “Personally I think that I believe that something might be important.”  Avoid using words such as “I think,” or “I believe,” rather say “it is.”
  4. Don’t write like you talk.  “You know, like I think it was such a good idea, but, umm, you know it may not sound so smart where you put that quote at.”
  5. Address your opposition’s argument before your opposition does.  Show that your opposition’s argument may be justified, but not valid.  “Sure, you were justified in being angry that I stepped on your foot, but you had no right in hitting me.”
  6. Use words good… You’re only as smart as you sound, but if you over-do it you lose your credibility and sound foolish.  Sound naturally intelligent without sounding like you consulted a thesaurus.  There’s always a better way to say “a lot” but you do not have to say “surfeit.”
  7. Use grammar, well, good… a few commas go a long way.  Use punctuation to guide style, avoid run-on sentences, and always check your spelling.
  8. Find your rhythm.  Read your paper out loud, have it read to you, or better yet, use software such as Audacity to record you reading your essay.  Where do you pause to breathe?  Does the essay flow well?  A well written essay will flow well when read aloud.  If you’re stumbling when you read it, so will your reader.
  9. Address the issue- all of them.  Introduce, explain, and conclude.  Don’t introduce issues you never address.  When you conclude your essay, leave your reader wanting more but satisfied with the answers you’ve given.
  10. Repetition can strengthen the impact of a statement, but it can also sound like you couldn’t find a better word.  Use repetition sparingly and effectively.

I need to refine these a bit, but this should give me a jumping off point for more…

Image from citizen_smith58′s photostream.