Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :: “School Bans Blogs”

Once again, paranoia reigns. As I think about school’s efforts to “protect” students, I am puzzled by how many choose to simply ban or restrict rather than educate on appropriate use. My litmus test continues to be, does the value outweigh the negative? For me, blogging has such powerful potential that it requires teachers to teach ethics and protocol. If we don’t do this, they’ll still blog only they’ll do it at home with little or no supervision or training in handling the technology.

As I continue to explore Flickr, for my upcoming workshop, I discover more and more tools and functionality.

Flickr groups are where people of like minds get together to form a…well, a group. These can be centered around interests (Extreme Knitting, Judy Garland Memorabilia), regions (Vancouver, Deep South) or anything else really. Each has its own home page and discussion board.

I dabble a bit with graphics and found this impressive. Have a look a this creative graphics group.

Try this: amaztype

Pretty cool huh?

This via Tim Lauer
#flickrWords .flickrImg { float: left; }

Spell with flickr

Stephen Downes writes about a study done stating “Computers can harm learning” These studies usually end up pointing people in the wrong direction. At first glance it might appear that removing technology from schools would be a good thing. It seems that’s the message that’s being promoted.

Todd Oppenheimer wrote a book called The Flickering Mind in which he tries to make the point that technology is largely a waste of money. I wrote a paper on his premise last year and found that he didn’t do an especially good job of getting to the real issue. We all know that computers and technology on their own do nothing to support learning. We get that and we also know that teachers are working hard for the most part to use technology in effective ways.

Read Jamie Mckenzie’s review of The Flickering Mind. Also NPR has an archived broadcast of an interview with Tood Oppenheimer.

I’m trying to figure out the motive behind these studies. Again if it’s trying to stay that teachers need to be more effective in their use of technology, few would argue. If it’s to say let’s cut back on the use of technology in learning…I have a big problem with that!

We had a noon session on blogging at Empire. I think we have a great crew of potential bloggers.

Watch for good things to come out of this school.

My friends know that on my birthday, they will be subjected to some game I invent. My rules, my game, my birthday. This year I created a game called 41 (named after my new age). Guys against girls as usual.

I created six categories:

• TV Themes
• Movies
• Classic Rock (songs most guys like)
• Chick Songs (songs your wives like…they usually complain the questions are slanted toward men which is probably true, thus the invention of this category)
• O’ Canada (songs by Canadian artists)
• Seinfeld

So I download the files and and bring them into my audio editor. If you don’t have one, download Audacity. Then I create little clips and it becomes a modified “Name that tune”. I award bonus points if teams will break into spontaneous song or answer some other trivia related question such as what year was the movie released. Teams must answer at least 2 questions in each category. 2 points are awarded for correct answers plus bonuses.

Audio editing can be a lot of fun. With the advent of podcasting it will become more prevalent. A few friends of mine have gotten into audio editing because their daughters are dancers or figure skaters and they need to create music for thier performances. I always encourage teachers to explore how they use technology outside the classroom and it won’t be long before they bring it into their classroom.

BTW, the guys won 41 to 40.

Not 100% applicable to our local situation, but it’s a nice piece of writing.

Kim Cavanaugh’s Brain Frieze