Nothing to do yesterday - Canada Day - after the disappointment of learning that a consulting job with a local school did not get funded. Since it was starting July 7, I figured I better call and get the hot skinny. Glad I did, but it was a letdown and of course they should have called me. I was revved to spend four days writing a NoteShare text to guide Wabanaki studies in the middle school. Might do it on my own in August.

The other project looming is a revision of my five chapters in Education for an Information Age, an online text I have written with Bernie Poole and a revolving group of others. Chapter 5 has been wandering into Web 2.0, so when I got bored with link checking and finding the latest reports on how and how much teachers and students use new media (kids average 6.5 hours outside of school!), I upgraded my own use of the net.

I poked around some Web 2.0 discussions and ran across Terry Freedman, who I used to follow in early ed tech discussion groups (truth - I lurked). Anyway, this led me to joining his list and I got a message leading me to this: Free Web 2.0 Books. I have downloaded them - and I urge those of you who are in need of summer ideas to spend some time with the Web 2.0 Projects file. You don’t have to read it all because the indexing makes browsing really easy.

Then I noticed the little note: Follow Terry in Twitter. Hmm - this is something I have been curious about for a year. So I followed Terry. I had read about Twitter - tell ‘em what u are doing - as often as you can. The thing is, you can actually record the excitement or boredom of your day this way, even by texting to your account. I was reminded of the poor fellow who lost his ability to remember in an accident - he lived in a 5-minute window - over and over again - and recorded that 5 minutes in a journal - over and over again.  He would have loved Twitter, if only to revisit his record of the few events in his life that awoke him - his wife’s visits and conducting a choral group. These could have been recorded on a Flip phone, uploaded to YouTube, linked to Twitter posts, and he could have filled alternate 5 minute bites by watching the videos. I don’t know if I will feel the need to record what I am doing in 140 words or less at least once every 24 hours, but I am giving it a try. This is the perfect tool for my “I am the center of my universe” students,  but most of the people I want to follow work in my building, I don’t want to know the hourly updates of my daughter’s pregnancy, and my days are generally more interesting in the aggregate.

But here’s an idea - there are lots of ways students can use periodic record keeping effectively. Recording: water use, food ingested, nature observations, laptop use, random responses to an urban walk, opportunities for recycling (lost or gained), reflections on a challenging activity (say, a visit to a rehab facility or a cemetery), how the gum taste changes during the day, how far they have read... Twitter + a cell phone or laptop might be a boon to online data collection, which leads to data analysis and higher order thinking.

That done, I was setting up my Bookmarks in Firefox again, after importing the archived bookmark file and finding that I had to manually rearrange the Bookmark folder.  So I got bored and decided to organize my feeds. I created a Bloglines account, which I am not sharing yet. The cool thing about this experience was getting podcast feeds. I can now listen to The Writer’s Almanac and StoryCorps whenever I want to. I found a feed to Cool Tools, which is a nice little blog about creative solutions to problem you might not know you have until you read the blog. Bloglines also would have solved my problem with feeds to student blogs - so overall, this was a good use of an hour, and an activity I highly recommend.

Then I decided to check out YouTube, which I can finally access because we are the 2nd home on our rural road to get DSL (if you are in the predicament of not having access when you know it’s available, just bug your carrier for a week - they can be worn down and really all they have to do is energize to flip a switch).  I immediately got distracted by The Dragon Illusion. Great idea for the first week of class! I remembered that Scott Love had shared the MLEI notebook with me, and I had folioed the resources of Barbara Greenstone, and it contained a little note about a new way to download YouTube videos.  So I found the link and followed the directions. I now can use a GreaseMonkey plugin to automatically open a download interface then I watch a YouTube video (if you do this, get the extension before you follow the link to the javascript). Pretty cool!  I got two kid-made videos showing “how-to” make the dragon illusion from a template. Then I got the template with a quick Google search. The first week of school we will be following directions (written, oral, video - what works?) and making our first short films. I might even reintroduce the Amazing Folding Cube so we can make our own how-to for YouTube. 

From Web 2.0 to hands-on problem solving - does it get any better than that?