Will Richardson posted today that Nickelodeon and Disney are entering the social networking market. Their target is the under-14 crowd. Nickelodeon’s site launched in January. Disney’s is still in beta. Will links to an article at USA Today that provides a comparison table.
I plan to spend some time checking these out. Many of our students use Neopets and Club Penguin so I’ve been thinking I need to go check them out. Now I have four sites to check out. I am wondering if/how I’ll need to revamp our internet safety strand in our curriculum in response to these sites. This year, it seemed that few of our third graders spent much time online. That seems to change over the year. Last fall some fourth graders knew what chat and IM were. Most of the fifth graders knew and at least half were using those tools. I predict that is all about to change with Disney in the game.
Trial by fire this past week. Tomorrow will mark my one week anniversary of being relocated while unexpected repairs have forced the closure of my office, my lab and the other rooms in my wing.
With the closure of my lab, I took over one of the drop-in labs. This has been a real problem for teachers because they have project in progress and now can’t get lab time to finish. The tech teachers are accommodating them as much as we can, but it is a distant second best.
The primary school has saved the day by giving us complete access to their drop in lab. This is especially good because our music department just began to use Music Ace. They alone can completely fill a lab, so the timing isn’t great, even though the growth of the kids is.
The librarian gave my assistant and me shelter on the lovely top floor of the library. I spend a lot of time running up and down floors between lab and office. Good exercise but bad for my productivity.
The workmen all over the building are inadvertently taking computers off-line, so when I’m not teaching I’m rushing around trying to get the remaining labs and classroom computers back online.
On top of that, it is the time of year to work with administration to pull next year’s budget into shape.
In the midst of all of this, I forgot that Promethean was loaning us an interactive white board to trial starting today through Feb. 23. It arrived this afternoon and we weren’t able to put it where we wanted to place it so it is now in the lab I am teaching in. Not the best timing, since there isn’t a blank moment in the lab during or after school between now and when the boards leave, especially since Monday and Tuesday are the Lunar Holiday.
However, despite what this may sound like, I’m not complaining. Every minute of every day is exciting and varied and puts me in contact with kids and teachers. After this, any job besides special agent is going to feel slow.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for a few years now. I really like how it works. Before that I’d used Backflip, but tagging works better for me than filing. Therefore, I’m glad tagging is slowly expanding to other apps. I can tag my photos in iPhoto, and my mail in Gmail. In fact, in the apps that don’t have it, I keep losing things– for example, I wish our Outlook at work could tag. I wish my Mail.app and even the Finder at home could, although Spotlight usually does find what I need eventually.
Given my success with tagging, it surprises me that in the past few weeks, I keep finding myself at a loss for a tag. Usually what happens is that reading a blog post leads me to a website that I want to tag. I’ll hit the del.icio.us tool on my web browser which takes me to my del.icio.us account, and there I sit. I can’t figure out what tags to give the page.
I think my problem lies in that given my new job, I’m often now sure of why or how I’m going to use the information. I know it is good stuff and I’ll want to get to it again, but I don’t yet have a big enough picture to foresee where.
Another piece of the problem is that my tags are so full, are so broad, that they are starting to feel less useful. For example, two years ago I started to use a web_apps tag. Back then I was adding a page or two a month using that tag. Now I could add a few a week. The tag is too broad to be useful, but I don’t really want to start breaking the apps down by type. I need a different way to organize them, but I can’t see what it is.
I’m experiencing that same confusion in many areas. For example, there have been a number of interesting education manifestos on the web and samples of next generation tech planning. How to tag those beyond ed_change and tech_coord? I’ve tried seeing how other people have tagged the same sites, but that hasn’t given me any better ideas yet. Is anyone else experiencing this tagging block? Has anyone found a way around it?
(Warning! This post is way off topic. I’m just in a mood to bark today.)
I’ve long been an advertiser’s nightmare. The few times I do find a commercial memorable enough to tell someone else about it, I generally have to preface the story with, “I don’t remember what it was advertising, but…”
This total disregard for ads has carried over the Internet. On blogs and wikis, I don’t notice the Google Ads in the sidebar. I mean REALLY don’t notice them– to the extent that I hadn’t even realized that one of MY OWN wikis had Google Ads on it until another teacher complained about them.
Therefore, it surprises me that I eventually noticed that in my Gmail account, the Spam folder lacks the usual Google Ads in the sidebar but does have a single ad just above the message window. Being a Google Ad, it is trying to match the ad to the content of the messages. And since these are Spam messages, the only ads Google can find to put on the page, are SPAM recipes.
For those of you not familiar with SPAM, it is a spiced ham product sold in tins by Hormel, a company based in Austin, Minnesota. Or, you may be familiar with “Spamalot!”, the Monty Python musical which features the Spam song.
I’ve eaten many a SPAM dish and actually enjoyed a number of them, but for some reason, I seem to find great humor in the recipe titles. Each new SPAM recipe title that appears sounds worse than the previous one to me. I grimaced when I read “Spam Potato Casserole” yesterday, but today’s “Spam Veggie Pita Pockets” sounds even worse. Or, how about the “Spicy Spam Kabobs”?
You may not find these Google Ads as funny as I do, but it makes me realize that there could be some pretty funny mismatches in other places. based on letter content. I hate to admit it but now I am going to start watching to see if the ads get it really wrong sometimes.
(BTW, someone had WAY too much fun creating the Spam website. Stop by and watch a tin of Spam ascend into the heavens atop cloud radiating light.)
Ms. Kim Cofino over at always learning wrote a post about Naomi Kline’s book No Logo. One thing that struck Kim while reading the book was how similar to each other are the lives of middle class students around the world, how flat their world already is thanks to their Levi’s and backpacks and music and McDonald’s.
It makes me think about Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade. It is a book about the effects of video gaming on business culture. Part of the first chapter is devoted to showing old fogies like me just how ubiquitous video games, are. There were video arcade games when I was in high school, but within five years of that time, gaming reached the lives of almost all American children and there it has stayed. The book then goes on to look at the implications of this. It is an interesting read and quite enlightening for old folks like me.
So on one level, you have all these middle class kids around the world leading similar lives. It puts them all in the same club because of their shared experiences and similar tech language. And then I think about the divide between them and the kids without a digital aspect to their lives. This gap could make it nearly impossible for the two groups to understand each other. Will they find a common language? Will they be able to find global solutions to world problems when they cannot identify with the people living there? What about the troubled countries where conflict and poverty have prevented the rise of middle class and its globally homogenizing effect? Will they have any voice?
I guess, they don’t have much voice now, so this might not change anything. And I shouldn’t sell today’s youth short. Statically they seem to be much more service focused than the GenXers. Maybe so many youths worldwide speaking a similar tech and pop culture language will give them enough in common that they can help each other understand their corners of the world.
If they can build those types of bridges, maybe they work together in much more successful ways than NATO and the UN and those types of organizations. Maybe the flat classroom projects that are springing up will start providing the connections needed to make it all happen. Maybe their collective wisdom will be a match for all the global messes they are inheriting.
It sounds like a long shot, but I welcome this chance to think optimistically about the future. Now, as a tech coordinator, I need to get myself in gear and figure out how to do my part. Here’s a big thanks to all the edubloggers out there like Clarence Fisher, Kim Cofino, Vicki Davis and so many others who are showing me the way.
Walking back to my classroom after lunch yesterday, I came upon a third grade child sobbing in the hallway. She was being comforted by a few friends, but I stopped to see if I could help her. With tears streaming down her cheeks she choked out,
My daddys in Iraq and we haven’t heard from him. We don’t know where he is. We don’t know! …I WANT my daddy…
What do you say to that?
If he’s still alive, chances are great that he IS in harm’s way. She’s 12,000 miles from home.
That’s a lot to carry at any age,
but especially when you are eight years old.
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