• del.icio.us now redirects to delicious.com Whew! Glad those periods are gone from the middle of the name. It was awkward to say, remember, and type. Now that problem is gone.
• Searching is much more dynamic. When you search your own, or someone else’s bookmarks, there are many more ways to search in a more robust way.
• Tags are more robust, as well.
• There are many other changes, but none that will be disruptive to those just getting started.

In short, those that use delicious frequently will be able to benefit from the changes most, and just do what they’ve been doing at a much higher level.

Wes Fryer blogs about the redesign here. Thanks to him for drawing my attention to it.

Delicious has a “What’s New On Delicious” page, which explains things pretty well.

They also have a blog entry of their own to lay out what the changes are, as well. It has a brief video which may be great for those of you who don’t want to read a bunch of text. But watch closely, because it does fast, as they demonstrate the differences, rather than show a bunch of PowerPoint-esque slides to communicate each point.

Here are my previous blog articles about delicious.

Elementary Math, Ancient Greece-6th Grade, Biomes-6th Grade, and Ancient China-6th Grade

These are groups of websites I’ve put together. When you go to any of the above web pages, you get a Google Search Engine that will use all of Google’s power to search ONLY THOSE SITES!

The advantage of using this is that you can use keyword searches to search several websites at once. Many websites have a database (aka: a search box where you can put in your search terms) that allow you to search their site very easily. One of the best sites, which has one of the cleanest interfaces of all the math sites I’ve seen is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. But it doesn’t have everything you might want if you’re searching for a good website to use to help you teach math. There are other sites that have a database of their own. The Google Custom Search Engine tool allows you to search all of them at once! It will even include, of course, web sites that don’t have a search box of their own.

I’m excited about this because I can send my students to these search pages and actually teach the concept and skill of performing good keyword searches, rather than sending them to just a list of links to try out, one by one. In the case of the Elementary Math Custom Search, I’m intending to allow other educators to search all of these sites at once.

Another very powerful feature of this tool is that sites can be contributed by up to 100 people!!! I invite anyone reading this who finds a great math website that you think should be part of this group of sites in this Custom Search, please send it to me. I can officially invite you through the Google page where I created the Custom Search, too..

Now, how is this different from http://del.icio.us/ ? This is another tool that I have also jumped into in a big way. I’ve been using my account consistently for quite a while now: http://del.icio.us/wark. I’ve also put a lot of math-specific sites together at this account: http://del.icio.us/math34

With Delicious, you can:

• Tag sites with categories you make up, that might or might not be words that show up when Google searches their titles, URLs, or text of the pages
• Give a quick notation to the sites you’re making public
• Put sites into categories (by the tags you make) for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for (and thus wouldn’t know what search terms to enter)
• Search your own (delicious) bookmarks, or all the bookmarks of all delicious users. Because of this feature, I initially thought that these two tools might not be all that different. At first, I thought…so why do this, if I can search delicious, too?

With Google Custom Search, you can

• Unleash Google’s powerful search algorithms to search through all of the sites you include
• Invite others to contribute
• Send people to your Google Custom Search in lots of ways. One is with simple links, as in the links above. Here’s another, like I’ve done with my class website. You can search right from your own website!

It’s been around since 2001, and has been talked about and referred to at almost every Educational Technology conference I’ve been to since that time. The terms “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” are now thrown around so frequently that it doesn’t even need to be explained any more.

Prensky’s thinking about effective ways to reach today’s students continues to evolve. He continues to work to apply some of his thoughts from this, his most famous article, to different contexts.

I highly recommend checking out his website. I have just perused it a bit, and really wish I had more time to read more of his stuff right now, but I really must get to sleep soon.

Some of the books and articles that I have also read, or at least are on my list to read are the following (he really chooses great titles, doesn’t he?):
Engage Me or Enrage Me
Don’t Bother Me, Mom — I’m Learning! (his latest book)
…there are many more… I sometimes just love to look at the titles of articles and books, and get an extremely brief version of the main thought of the writing. This is one reason I love to hang out in bookstores so much.

His writing is full of eye-opening quotes, not from philosophers or theologians, but simple statements from these Natives that he has provided such clarity about.

Why am I finally getting around to responding to this article? This week I’m going through SB 472 training, which is a California “thing” (SB meaning Senate Bill) where we get a week of training on our new textbook, in this case, Math. This article was assigned as homework one of the days.

OK, so what do I think of the article itself? Here are the specific points that I found particularly striking, amusing, etc.:

•The phone call asking “DId you get my email?” has happened at my school. We’ve talked about reducing the interruptions to the classroom (silent emails being much less disruptive than a phone call), but viewing this not as annoying defeating the purpose, Prensky has reminded me that the office personnel is probably “speaking with an accent” here

•I was amazed at how proficient my students were at playing certain games they showed me on the internet during the last few days of school, one being Club Penguin. TypeRacer is another example that was spontaneously very successful. Ever since becoming familiar with Prensky’s thinking, and other progressive, forward-thinking experts in educational technology, I have had a passion for trying to figure out how to “get rid of my accent”, and how to best use the “language” of my students, the digital natives, to reach them. I want to figure out how to use games to make learning more engaging, since this is what I am, in fact, competing with. I will be seen as boring and irrelevant if I don’t learn to speak their “language.” We must “engage them or enrage them.” This is more than pithy, clever sayings. This is for real. This is why I get grouchy about those that insist on our students learning the culture of the Digital Immigrants:

•It’s very tempting to conclude, as Prensky “quotes”, My students just don’t ___ like they used to,” etc. What we need to do is to recognize that they ARE DIFFERENT THAN US. We need to change and adapt. We need to learn from them, as well as them learning from us.

•”‘Future’ content includes the ethics, politics, sociology, languages, and other things that go with the software, hardware, etc.” This is one reason I would like to see a more loose policy on cell phones at school. We need to teach them how to appropriately use them (or, in most cases, NOT use them) I experimented with having my students use their cell phones as calculators, but ran into some problems with some very valid issues that administration brought up. Even so, it saddened me that we couldn’t bring some of the technology that they see as absolutely relevant in their lives into the classroom learning experience. I saw many of my students kind of “come alive” when I validated some of their “native” culture. It’s a sticky one…very interesting…

•He mentions games to teach concepts like classical philosophy, the Holocaust, etc.  This renewed my enthusiasm to try and find game to help teach concepts to my students. He acknowledges that many of the attempts at this have been pretty bad (edutainment), but that we must continue to improve, because WE CAN FIGURE THIS OUT! One game that has been successful “in” my 6th grade classroom has been Civilization. Since I teach Ancient Civilizations, this is an IDEAL application. No, I can’t use class time for it. But I can offer a copy or two for checkout to my students. I can refer to it when we’re discussing content from our textbook. I can encourage students to get together in the classroom after school, or at each other’s houses , to play it together. I can affirm the expert in my room who knew about it before I even mentioned it, and had a more advanced version than I did; I can ask him to share with the class what the game taught him about ____ (filling in the concept that we were studying that day).

I’m far from figuring out how to apply Prensky’s thoughts to my own classroom practice, but I feel good about how I’ve started to experiment…

PS – David Thornburg and Hall Davidson have both written recently about Prensky’s thoughts. Thornburg expressed some reasons that Prensky’s thesis is incomplete, inadequate, and/or inaccurate. Davidson sided with Prensky, and did a great job of expressing why. This discussion took place in the OnCUE Journal, published by CUE, Computer Using Educators, with Thornburg writing an article, then Davidson and Thornburg both writing a letter to the editor, continuing the conversation. This will really be something to watch. These guys are both such great thinkers and leaders, I’m not sure I know which one I agree with!! I guess I’ll live in the tension…

In 1922, Fredrick Taylor came up with a model of management planning. Henry Ford used this to organize & manage his famous assembly line. Education used this same kind of thinking to organize itself. Previously, there were 1-room schoolhouses, with teachers teaching 8 grades, with olders teaching youngers, personalized instruction, etc. As a result of the Taylor management, education became squeezed into the assembly-line mold. This was not a problem, though. In fact, it worked extremely well at the time! The problem is that the economy has changed!

We then talked about RSS feeds. It’s his view that every student, in order to graduate from high school, should know how to manage their RSS feeds.

Wikipedia should not be so much a source, but a publishing center. He challenged us to write a wikipedia article WITH our class. Lots of great discussion there.

We discussed the ways we might teach the different perspectives on the American Revolution between the US and Britain. We could fascilitate a debate between American kids and British kids. Kids prepare, they make PowerPoints using GoogleDocs, send the PPTs to each other (across the pond). They then are essentially telling each other the story from their perspective. Then a debate is scheduled via Skype. This is recorded, and it can be put up on iTunes. What a motivation!!!! Compare that to kids that just “learn” the content for the test, and then forget it the next day. The podcast would be something that the students would very likely listen to over and over, would share with many others.

He also showed us how to use Google Custom Search for several purposes. More on this on a different post.

At the “World Café” event put on by CTAP 7 the other night, Alan November showed us a tool that has me thinking. It’s the ability to set up your own search engine…sort of. It’s called Google Custom Search Engine.

You choose the sites that should be in the bank of websites that it will search. Others can collaborate in assembling those sites. People can go to your search page, put in whatever search terms they want, and it will use the Google search algorithms to search within those pages.

How does a teacher decide which to use? You’d have to really be clear about:

• who would be using your tool (delicious page or Google Custom Search)
• what the purpose would be
• and other factors

I’ll have to get my hands dirty with Google Custom Search, and do a more thorough analysis on the idea of which tool would be best for which situation…

For the past few years, we (my school site) have been using Mavis Beacon to teach typing to our 6th grade students. This has presented immense technical problems, many having to do with problems in our local network, which has meant major delays in when the program can start with our students. Plus, our use of the computers has been delayed far too late in the school year for my comfort.

As I’m thinking about next year, I think I’m going to suggest that we abandon Mavis (since the version we’ve purchased isn’t compatible with the newer operating systems anyway), and start out with Dance Mat Typing, (which has levels, guides you through the different sets of letters) and then follow up with TypeRacer. Still chewing on this one, though…

The Keynote address was Marco Torres, an amazing educator. Here are some links that he gave us about him and what he’s done.
http://sfett.com/
http://torres21.typepad.com/flickschool/
http://cinedelagente.com/

He showed us some phenomenal stuff that he does with GarageBand.

——-

My first two sessions went very well, in my opinion. I setup a blog article for each of the sessions. (Just previous to this article)

Now I’m in a session with Mike Lebsock talking about Colonial Williamsburg and Podcasting. What an energetic guy – it was a pleasure to meet him and get to know each other today!
There’s a gold mine of resources for a 5th grade teacher in the form of the Colonial Williamsburg podcast.

I’m interested to find some high-quality podcasts that are specific to 6th grade content, as well. Whether it’s Ancient Civilizations, Science, or whatever…

A Moment in Time, by Dan Roberts is also a good resource for podcasts on American History.

Since he gave us a great packet of handouts, so I’m not taking notes terribly feverishly, as I might if we didn’t have handouts.

He recommended the Snowball mic (got it on eBay for $70 – retail price is about $300)

——

Now I’m in “More than 100 Free Web Based Integration Tools” with John Corippo. For this one, I went with a sort of rapid-fire note taking style. He explained the following tools. Some I was able to get the URL’s for, others, I’ll have to explore more later…

thinkfree.com
googledocs

GoogleApps (http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/index.html)
Dance Mat Typing (for Mac) http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/
TuxTyping (for Windows or Linux)
VoiceThread (http://voicethread.com/)
Tooble/tv
Photoshop for free
Young Frankenstein – puns
Picasa (Google’s version of iPhoto; PC only; upload pictures from any camera)
David Jakes tutorial on Picasa
Jingproject.com (only limitation = 5 minutes)
Screencast
Stock Xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/)
EdZone (http://www.k12hsn.org/edzone/)
Utah Education Network / UEN (http://www.uen.org/)
Contains an improvement on Starfall
http://www.uen.org/3-6interactives/index.shtml

http://ctap7.pbwiki.com/Tech+Integration

Most of the session will consist of demonstrating the application. We will also cover “Google Sketch-Up.” Here are some links that you might find useful in getting familiar with GoogleEarth and Sketch-Up

GoogleEarth home page. Download the program and access support community, Google Sketch-Up (click on “Build 3D models”), etc. all from here.

Google Sketch-Up, 3D Warehouse. Download 3D models others have built.

Sketch-Up Help Center

My del.icio.us links tagged GoogleEarth

Wes Fryer’s del.icio.us links tagged GoogleEarth

“What’s del.icio.us?” you ask? Read this blog post. I describe it more fully there. (Here’s another post about del.icio.us)

———————————————————————————————————————
Zamzar
http://zamzar.com

1. Select files (Choose File) or paste URL.
2. Choose the format to convert to:
(Image, Document, Music, Video, and more!)
3. Enter your email address to receive converted file.
4. Click “Convert”.
5. Wait for the email.
6. Click on the link in the email to download converted file.
7. Put video in iTunes for easy access during class.

•Wait time has increased since the paid account option appeared.
•YouTube or TeacherTube videos are now “harvestable” to your hard drive.
•Grab video that might be blocked on your campus, or otherwise not be accessible during class time.
•Put downloaded videos in a video editor like iMovie to crop, combine, etc.

———————————————————————————————————————
Handbrake

1. Download at http://handbrake.fr/
2. Put application in the proper place (Applications folder on Mac OS X) so it runs off the hard drive instead of the disk image.
3. Run program & insert DVD.
4. Wait. Program will take time to read the chapters on the DVD.
5. Choose the section of the DVD that you want to harvest to your hard drive (might be tricky; might have to guess).
6. Explore pop-up options.
7. Click Start.
8. Wait. Now it’s reading and harvesting the chapter from the DVD to your hard drive.
9. Locate file on your hard drive. If it’s too long, use a video editor such as iMovie to trim it down.
10. Put it in iTunes for easy access during class.

Click here to download a Word document version of this Zamzar and Handbrake How-To

Please comment below if you have additional tips on either of these two tools, or if you think something I’ve done here could be improved.

Just recently, though, I ran across a suggestion to use it with students more directly. I plan to make a video podcast of this tip, and I’ll eventually post that video podcast here.
But since my students won’t be ready for that for quite a while, I thought I’d post the script that I’ve prepared for that podcast here. Because it’s a bit long, intended to be heard, not read, I’ll give you a summary first, then the more involved version.

Summary:

1. Students type their writing in MS Word.
2. Use Spelling & Grammar to check the readability of their own work. At first, they will likely be disappointed to see what a low grade level their writing is.
3. Encourage them to add compound sentences, complex sentences, or more clauses & phrases.
4. Students use the same feature again to see if the readability has gone up.

Here’s an example that I tried.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. = Level 2.3 (meaning 2nd grade, 3rd month)

After sleeping for most of the morning, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. = Level 6.1

Even though he was tired from jumping over the candlestick with Jack, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, who awoke with a yelp. = Level 9.9

More involved version:

MS Word – Readability Statistics
Here’s how to use Microsoft Word to evaluate the reading level of something that you have written.

In Microsoft Word, go to the application menu to access the Preferences. Choose Spelling and Grammar from the left, and then check the box that says “Show readability statistics”
You might have to check “Check grammar with spelling” first, so that the Show readability statistics box will be available and not grayed out.
Once you have done this, you’re ready to go.

In the document that you wish to check, go to the Tools menu and select Spelling and Grammar. This will first spell-check and grammar-check your document. At the end of this process, you will get a window that shows you the readability statistics. It includes:

Counts, which will simply count how many words, characters, paragraphs, and sentences you’ve typed.

Averages, which gives you some other statistics like sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, and characters per word.

Finally, in the bottom section of the window, you’ll see Readability. This is the part that tells you at what reading level you are writing. The number you want to really focus on is the bottom one, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. This example, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” shows that I have written at a Readability level of (2.3).

If I click OK, and then change my writing to include some more compound sentences, complex sentences, or things like that, then I can do the same process again, and see whether my writing level has gone up.

Let’s change the sentence a little: After sleeping for most of the morning, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Now let’s go to Tools, Spelling & Grammar, and see what the readability level is now. (6.1)

Now, what if we add another phrase to the end of the sentence:
Even though he was tired from jumping over the candlestick with Jack, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, who awoke with a yelp. (9.9)

This is just one measure, and not the ultimate answer of the universe about your writing level. However, it might help you to evaluate your writing and encourage you to write at a higher level.