I’ll be leaving a week from Friday for Boston and have been asked to boil down what we do at our school news site to a one-minute video that we’ll upload to Youtube and package together with the rest of the panel into an introduction of sorts.

The others on the panel are most impressive, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really feel like I have the experience or knowledge to be more than a member of the audience. Nevertheless, I’ve been invited and I’m really looking forward to getting to hear from some brilliant practitioners of media, media literacy and technology education.

I wrote a script for what I would like to put together for our video. I want to show all of the free technologies that we use to produce the school news site, which launched about 10 days ago. It’s impossible to demonstrate so many technologies in a minute, so my students will hold up hand-written signs with the names of the products we incorporate into the production and marketing of the site. (I wonder how many commercial news organizations use these, or if they rely on expensive quick-to-date special software, the way our school district does for certain programs).

With no budget, no sponsorships yet (save one small one), free is great. It occurs to me that when I began this blog 16 months ago, the only one on this list I’d ever used was Gmail. What will I know 16 months from now? What will I be teaching?

Here’s the list:

Joomla! a content management system that is slick, flexible and pretty complicated to learn for a newbie like me. But I did it.

Photoshop.com: we use this to edit photos before uploading to a central storage site

Picasa: our Google-based storage site for photos waiting to be uploaded to joomla

Flickr: this is where we search for Creative Commons-licensed photos when we can’t or didn’t get a local one for a story.

Freepixels.com: another place to search for photos licensed to be used.

Skype: I am in the process of planning Skype collaboration with three journalism teachers from across the country who I “met” on the JEA listserv. We want to have our staffs video conference and use each other as national correspondents on a few stories. This will hopefully be in place prior to the MIT conference, or shortly upon my return from our Fall Break, the last week in October.

Google Docs: We have e-forms on our site built on Google docs. One of them allows sponsors to sign up for a level of sponsorship. Another allows readers/viewers to suggest stories for us to cover. We also started off the year using Google docs as an editing vehicle. Students would upload their story and share it as a link with their editors (a section editor, copy editor, editor-in-chief and myself) through a four-step process. It sounded good in theory but ultimately (after only a week) I had to drop it because a) kids don’t check their emails regularly and b) I could never tell where the story was in the chain. This might have worked for a print publication that goes out once a month or every few weeks. For a daily news operation, I learned it’s critical (or at least very nice) to have the content loaded into one place and have the editors come to it. Thus, the students now upload their stories directly into joomla, into a special “needs editing” category, where they await the editors.

Clustrmaps: this is a neat little hit counter that puts a red dot on a world map every time someone clicks on the site for the first time. The dots get bigger the more unique hits from any one area. Last week, we got Brazil, South Africa and The Philippines. We have a map of the world on our wall and are putting a pin in it to match the Clustrmap.

Mail Chimp: we are going to be offering an email digest version of our news site to anyone who signs up for it. This will be another way of reaching out and getting our news into “their space.” We will have links to certain stories and videos and each email will also carry the names and links to our top Platinum sponsors for one year. Mail Chimp makes the email auto response and organization very easy.

Google Sites: we use this wiki program as a place to store some documents, such as the handbook and the local style guide that we are very slowly developing. I also foresee it as a place for students to build their portfolios of published work. But that will have to be implemented a bit later.

Ning: We have a class ning page where I place non-deadline assignments. For example, I might ask the students to read a certain article and state why it is so good, so readable or interesting. There are video lessons (TED talks, etc…) on the site, photos from field trips, links to other places.

Twitter: We use Twitter to reach out offsite and we also stream our Facebook fan page updates to Twitter on the front page of our site because Twitter is not blocked at school, while Facebook is (why the difference? No idea. Maybe the district thinks no one could be harmed in 140 characters.)

Gmail: We have an account for the news site. Gmail is great because you can label emails with different colors and titles and the search feature is amazingly fast.

Facebook: We post teasers and links once a day, in the evenings, to stories that we just posted up on the site. We have 410 fans today. (Our school is 900 students).

Jing: I used this video component to make a 2-minute video screen capture of our news site for Back to School night. We had a booth in the quad but our school doesn’t have wireless except in the cafeteria, so I had the kids play the video loop to show parents. This was our launch day, so it was important marketing to give people a visual sense of what we were all about. The problem with jing is I can’t figure out a way to export files. I may have to pony up $30 or so for a commercial version.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons-licensed “Web Refractions” by ecstaticist on Flickr.

Starting with the basic Gmail service has led to an exploration of the Google suite of tools, of which I currently use Google Reader (to keep track of dozens of blogs and websites), Google Docs (to store, edit and share documents, build surveys and post pdfs to the web), Google Sites (to run a wiki site for my Journalism class). In the near future, I plan to test out Google Moderator in a class assignment.

My comfort with Google led to experimenting with Ning, the free social network site that allows you to create and maintain a closed-gated community. I have created four nings and trained lots of teachers on how to make and use them. EtherPad is next on my list to try.

The nings led me to blogging, including this blog on Edublog.com. And all of my experience with these programs finally led me, with a push from a colleague, to joomla! when it came time to start my online news site for school. And that is where my high feelings of technology competence came crashing to the floor.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very sophisticated and built by computer programmers around the world sort of as a service to the world. Most do it for free; some try to sell extensions and templates for profit. Most likely these programmers think that mere mortals such as high school teachers comfortable with Google and Facebook can use such exotic offerings like their joomla! with few problems. Sort of like, in theory, they should be able to come into my 6th period classroom of 36 10th grade world lit students and lead an orderly discussion on the themes in Oedipus Rex. Right.

I’ve met my match in Joomla! I’ve been using it since last April and I told my colleagues at the ASNE institute this summer that the first 20 hours Joomla! kicked my butt, the next 60 hours we were in a tense standoff and the last 20 hours I kicked it’s butt. That was all true, and it still would be true if I were the only user of the site I’ve set up. Now that there are 28 other users, I’m running into issues. For example, today somehow some of the text on the site has mysteriously turned to italics. I have no idea how or why. Not all the text, just some. There’s no logic to it, and I can’t seem to undo it because I don’t know how it got that way.

Other problems: I took the site offline last week so we could prepare it for the opening day, which is now four days away. The kids all had user ids and passwords and I assumed this would let them log in and submit their stories, but apparently not. After several frantic emails (on a Sunday! and trust me I was at my computer all day), I figured out I had to upgrade their status from editor (on the front end) to manager (on the back end) so they could submit their work. Shortly after doing this, the italics appeared. Sigh.

Creative Commons image courtesy of clairity

School’s been out now for two days, and after a year of what seriously feels like inventing the wheel, I feel a great need to reflect. It has been an amazingly creative time for me, but I have to admit, it’s been a big adjustment to a new school culture, with the co-workers, the kids, the administration, the policies and the routines that come with change. I’m exhausted, a little irritable during the transition to summer, but also deeply satisfied. 

I’m going to set a goal of blogging every day for a month, well, until July 12 when I leave for an ASNE Journalism Fellowship in Columbia, MO. The two weeks there are supposedly intense and will likely cut into my blogging time. 

Topics to come:

• Ning experiences (did I like it more than my kids?)
• Wiki (ditto)
• The online survey I had my students take at the end of the year (not sure I wanted to know all that)
• Sophomores (teaching them, understanding them?)
• World Lit (assignments that worked, those that didn’t, brainstorming for next year)
• Journalism (the class I’ll start in the fall, the book my kids published this year)
• Teaching (why unions need to be weakened but not destroyed in order to save our profession)
• International collaboration efforts (what I want to do next year)

Photo credit: “Blue Day Moon” by Jon Matthews

]]> http://westegg.edublogs.org/2009/06/14/back-from-the-dead/feed/ 2 http://westegg.edublogs.org/2008/07/20/daniel-pink-is-my-hero/ http://westegg.edublogs.org/2008/07/20/daniel-pink-is-my-hero/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:34:05 +0000 Melissa http://westegg.edublogs.org/?p=22

Well, that may be going too far, but he’s certainly someone whose premise I hope and pray is right! According to his excellent book A Whole New Mind, the U.S. economy is transitioning from the Age of Information to what he calls the Conceptual Age, an era that will be kind to creators and empathizers. It’s an age that will reward imagination, joyfulness, social dexterity and humor. Cultural creatives comprise one-quarter of U.S. adults; they are right-brain dominant and are good at:

• seeing the big picture
• synthesizing information
• feeling empathy and sympathy by taking the viewpoint of the person speaking
• embracing an ethic of caring

My people! 

The Information Age rewarded reasonably priced and functional products; it required people strong in logic, calculation and sequential thinking. But now that the “left brains have made us rich,” says Pink, these qualities and people are no longer enough. With so many cheap products flooding the marketplace thanks to overseas labor, consumers have an abundance of choices (for example, cell phones) and are starting to crave items that are more aesthetically, emotionally or spiritually pleasing (as in the iPhone). And jobs that depend on routine skills are disappearing overseas, as well.

What cannot be outsourced or mechanized are those six very human, creative qualities above. And these are what we should incorporate into our teaching. As an English teacher these aptitudes make me very happy! The study of literature can easily incorporate the six areas. We can ask students to tell what makes a story emotionally engaging, what makes a poem beautiful, what gives a whimsical quality to that scene in a play: this is design. What about empathy? How better to understand character interplay, conflicts and motivations than to ask students to empathize with the characters, to map out their relationships and explain why they care (or don’t care) for each other. How about updating the characters of “Antigone” with their own Facebook or MySpace pages? What music would Creon listen to today? What would his mood be? What famous quotation would Haemon highlight? What gods would make his top friends? I will definitely be using my Ning page for this activity.

In fact, now that I think about it, the six aptitudes defined by Pink are probably what led me to major in English in the first place. Finding meaning in literature is one of my favorite things in the world, and applying that meaning to my own life IS my favorite thing in the world. 

How refreshing this is after eight years of drilling down into stories and poems and non-fiction with all those left-brain dominant standards, such as this one:

 ”3.2 – Evaluate the structural elements of the plot (e.g., subplots, parallel episodes, climax), the plot’s development, and the way in which conflicts are (or are not) addressed and resolved.”

I believe in the standards, believe they are necessary so that there is an overall scope and sequence to our students’ progression through the grades. I love organization and logical progress. So I will not be tossing the standards by the wayside. Rather, what I will try to do is balance them with creative, meaning-making opportunities. It’s not enough to evaluate structural elements since apparently we could outsource such tasks to our student friends in India or China!

Our students should also be asked to take those elements and create something new, unique or playful. For instance, with the 8th grade standard above, they could identify the parallel episodes and then — I’m totally making this up right now — try to discover “perpendicular episodes” (i.e. the parts of the plot that are most disparate, jarring or contrasting to each other) or they could take an episode in the plot that has no parallel and insert one of their own making, then evaluate how it adds or detracts from the meaning of the piece.

The possibilities are rich, or, as Pink says, ”meaning is the new money!” 

Over the past few months I’ve been browsing blogs, clicking on links and gathering information about how I want to incorporate technology into my teaching this year. It’s been a fascinating survey, and I particularly enjoy the enthusiasm and sincerity with which my teaching colleagues “out there” and the technology experts write about the newest developments.

At times I thought my head would explode from the overload, but I kept coming back for more because I began to see the vague outlines of some ideas building (rather like a tag cloud… big 18-point yes to Ning, but a tenuous 9-point maybe to Animoto, etc…). I learned how to create a del.icio.us page and just kept posting websites on it to go back to. It felt like a particularly great buffet, and I enjoyed overloading my plate. 

Once school got out in mid-June and I’d moved my stuff over to my new classroom at the high school, I came home and made a to-do list. The technology tasks included:

1. Create a website that will be the permanent home to the course overview, rules, contact information for parents and “about me” profile. Thanks to iWeb on my MacBook, this was very easy and fun.
2. Build my part of the school wiki, which will be where I post weekly homework and where students post essays, video and where I will link to resources. The school started the wiki last February and most of my incoming 10th graders will be familiar with it. Building my part of it was more difficult than the web page, and does not feel intuitive. I’m going to be a team player and get on board with the wiki; I think from a student vantage it would be useful for them to go to one place rather than 6-7 teacher websites.
3. Create a Ning social network for my students. This will be the place to informally discuss ideas, watch videos, brainstorm, socialize outside of class and get creative. The Ning was easier to learn than the wiki, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I have two videos on it and many ideas that I want to try with students.
4. Build a blog. This is it, and I’m happy with it so far, but have found the functions of edublogs.org to be the most difficult to learn. I think it’s just me.

There were many other non-tech items on the list, including reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit. One of the items came before everything else, and that was to pause long enough from my research to attempt to write out my philosophy. I felt the need to focus on the bottom line for my work, the big picture stuff, before building an infrastructure or deciding what to experiment with. This bottom line would guide me and help me to say yes to some aspects of Web 2.0 and no thanks to others. The purpose I came up with looks like a circle, with four tasks each pointing to the next. Students will:

• Develop enthusiasm for literature
• Read important works and understand why they’re important
• Write clearly and will style
• Communicate effectively through logic, argument and emotion