José Cordero

I just recorded my Voicethread for Thing 23! It’s over!

Thanks for reading, both of you. Seriously. Now, don’t ever return. Or at least not until after the summer.

Bye!

José

One of the things that’s tricky about social networking is that you have to be social in order for it to work. MySpace continues to rank at the top of websites visited in the US (only behind Google and Yahoo! according to Alexa.com) even though MySpace is the “lamest site ever” (according to my teenaged cousins.) There are other social networking sites out there, most of them with much better code and far superior functionality. But social is the key word here, and once you’re entrenched in a network, it’s hard to just pack up and go somewhere else.

What I find interesting about Ning is that they seem to be sincere in the idea that social networks are about topics, not social connections. I myself have no inclination to spread my attention thinner across more social networks, even for a topic I’m really invested in. I barely check the networks I’m on right now! I think that Facebook is on the right track by letting people create and join groups to extend their social network, without having to go to a completely different site to do so.

With only 21 members in the elementary group and no activity for more than a week, I’m not sure how social the Ning site really is. I’ll keep checking back though. Maybe it should send me a friend request.

Creating a Pageflakes reminded me of making a Newsvine page, or customizing the iGoogle page. I think it’s really amazing that web designers have created code that allows pages to be so easily and intuitively manipulated and generated on the fly from many different sources. It’s also a little overwhelming.

Since I teach younger students, I want a whole lot more control over what I show them on a screen. The very thing that makes the flakes so cool - that they are generated in real time from various sources of content - makes it almost impossible to consistently know what’s going to appear on the screen. That’s great for a changing news environment (like world events) and not so necessary for kindergarten content (like the life cycle of the butterfly.)

Even though Pageflakes is slick, clever, and pretty, I think I’d still opt for static links to approved sites for my classroom. On the other hand, I’m excited about creating a page for myself for professional development, the latest research in teaching reading, and best of all: sudoku puzzles!

My experience with Google Docs has been positive this year. My teaching partner and I have used shared documents as a way to keep each other informed of work we assign in the classroom, to plan letters to parents, and to collaborate on the process of writing up our reading curriculum. We haven’t used Google Docs with our students yet, and I’d like to think more about what would be a useful or appropriate way to do so with K/1 students. I wish there were a way to record sound, so I could keep a spreadsheet of how kids sound reading aloud throughout the year, but I guess some features are better kept in standard office apps instead of online.

One bit of resistance I have to keeping documents online is that I understand I’m essentially giving Google an open door into my entire life (not that they don’t already read my email and remember my searches…) I know that they try to stand by their pledge to not be “evil,” but I’m sensitive to how much access this company has to my information. I’m only slightly comforted by the fact that I know they just want to sell me things with incredibly well targeted ads. Maybe if I buy enough stuff they’ll leave me be.

I love YouTube. I think it lives in a funny space between the past and the future. Clearly, there’s some old media and copyrighted material there, and I’m always wondering how they pay for the bandwidth costs (Thanks, Google!) But I think YouTube is the first star of the post-copyright world. Most video on YouTube is self-produced, and these “directors” want to share their creative works with the world. It’s a whole new marketplace of ideas and entertainment, but even marketplace isn’t really the right word because money isn’t obviously changing hands.

YouTube is a ridiculously easy playground for propagating new ideas, art, and music. Here’s a great clip of street animation that 10 years ago would have struggled to find a means of distribution, but will surely be world-famous by the end of the week:

As to classroom use, I love being able to grab media-rich examples of classroom topics of discussion at the drop of a hat. Of course, I should mention that it’s always important to preview anything you intend to show to young students, but that’s obvious, right? Also, our class this year has used YouTube to distribute some of our work, but I can’t tell you about it or give you a link. It’s all about privacy. Sorry. (Uh, I didn’t say this, but maybe you could SCROLL DOWN the page for an earlier link to a YouTube video that is DEFINITELY NOT our class. Not at all.)

Below you’ll find my Evoca podcast, where I talk about 3 ways to use podcasting in my K/1 classroom. Evoca was simple to use, but I really like the tools I have on my Mac for podcasting. I really like the iWeb/GarageBand combo, especially the automatic generation of RSS feeds. But Evoca was OK. I might use it again.

A couple of years ago we started a podcast in our K/1 classroom. My goal with this program was to support repeated reading and increase reading fluency. Because of our school’s strict privacy policy, our podcast was kept on a server that requires authorization. I can’t share the RSS feed with  the world, but I’ve grabbed one of the episodes and posted it below.
Podcast Episode 3

In terms of creating motivation for repeated practice, the podcast definitely worked. Our kids were practicing reading like crazy! However, it definitely raised questions for me about the conflict between fostering internal motivation and using the influence of external motivation through the biggest audience of all: everyone on the internet.

I’m doing a quick scan right now of how many ways I have available to me right now on my computer to create a goal for myself. In my applications folder, I have (in alphabetical order:)

1. Adobe Photoshop. I could create a motivational poster with all my goals on it.
2. Alarm Clock. I could set a goal as an event and keep track of how much time I have left, or have lots of alarms to track my progress.
3. AppleWorks 6. So many choices! A list of goals in a Word Processing document? Maybe more details in Spreadsheet format? Maybe I’ll make my own database of goals!
4. Automator. I could create a workflow to pull up my latest goals, edit them, and check off the things that are done.
5. BBEdit. There’s nothing like a bare-bones text editor to keep track of my lists.

Wait, I’m only on the letter “B” so far. This is going to take forever. Maybe I should just mention that aside from the multi-purpose apps I could use for goal setting (like MS Office, Apple Mail, or iCal,) I have a few that are specifically made for that purpose, Like OmniFocus and TaskPaper.

So why would I want to use 43 Things for all my goal-setting and tracking needs? Well, it’s a social networking site, so I can see who else has the same goals as me (and cheer them on!) Then again, there’s nothing to keep me from sharing goals on Facebook or MySpace, or on my blog, or in my Twitter feed, or on my podcast… I predict that 43 things will become Web 2.0’s one-stop shop for all your goal setting needs, just like Pets.com was Web 1.0’s one-stop shop for everything about pets. Except dog food. That’s just too heavy to ship.

LibraryThing is a perfect web 2.0 startup. Almost. On the plus side, it features tagging, lots of user generated data, and is clearly marked as being in Beta. On the minus side, the visual style is all wrong, and the name has an unfortunate preponderance of vowels. They should change it to LbryTng* and make some round shiny icons in florescent colors.

I doubt I will use this “service” in my classroom or in my personal life. I’m very happy with the ways that I discover books right now, and I don’t imagine I’d get a good return on investment for all the time it would take me to enter my library on the site. I’d just feel like I was giving away my precious marketing information. And I like my Delicious Library just fine. It’s not that I don’t get how very very web 2.0 it is to tag your books and use the wisdom of crowds to uncover gems. I’m just not sure this new site will do any better than all the other sites who know the books I’ve bought recently and are constantly pitching me discoveries from the long tail…

So long ago I can’t remember when (maybe December of 2005?) I set up a writeboard page through my backpack account to start creating a collaborative list of songs my friends wanted to hear at my upcoming wedding. This was way back in the day, long before Google Docs, long before Google had even acquired Writely to begin its empire of web-based office tools. Shucks, back then we were still walking barefoot in the snow uphill both ways to get to school. I had to teach my friends how to edit the online document so that they could let me know that They Might Be Giants needed to come earlier in the playlist, before Flock of Seagulls.

To go back and look at writeboard now reminds me of how groundbreaking it seemed back then, and how absolutely trivial it appears right now to collaborate online. How quickly things change!

To be fair, I looked at some of the other tools, including Toondoo.  What I’m amazed by is the programming innovation and skill developers have shown to create these tools online that rival traditional software applications. At the same time that the power of web apps are growing, the barrier to entry is crumbling, so we get very professional results from end users who have little knowledge or practice. The people making comics on Toondoo clearly don’t have years of Photoshop study under their belts, nor a degree in journalism. But hey, the comics look pretty!