This is a week for new things. First Stumble Upon and now Twitter. Unfortunately, my district blocks Twitter so I was looking for a new way to use it and follow feeds. If I couldn’t post and follow posts from work, it wasn’t a realistic option. I even tried to use my phone for “tweeting” but I didn’t think it was a good alternative.
After some searching, I found Twitbin a Firefox plug in that connects to my twitter account and allows me to somehow access it though a sidebar in my browser. I don’t know how it works and I really don’t care. I can now follow the likes of Will Richardson, David Warlick, Bud Hunt, Clarence Fischer, Jeff Utecht, Steve Dembo and the other thinkers in this area. I’ve only posted a few “tweets” so far, but I find it an intriguing way to keep abreast of what these people are thinking about and doing.
I was a little skeptical at first, but I’m sitting at my desk while others are at the T + L conference. I was able to follow some of their thoughts and reactions (not to mention adding to the conversation) of the conference without being there. It’s an interesting practice. We’ll see how long I stay interesting in it.
This was all prompted by a blog post by Will Richardson that Bud Hunt’s blog pointed me to.
I know this isn’t new, but I just started using Stumble Upon as a way to find new stuff on the web. What I like about it is that it’s a Firefox plugin that gives you a toolbar and it has a filter in which you can decide which categories you’d like to stumble upon. It has a social networking side to it that I’m still discovering, but overall, I really like it.
If you’re looking for new things online, check it out. I’ve only just started, but here’s my public profile http://bbass3.stumbleupon.com/public/
One of the classes I used to teach was entitled Modern Media. It’s basically a media literacy class in which we looked at the different types of media and explored the biases, production techniques and historical influences on these mediums. It’s a very interesting class, chock full of teachable moments.
As I taught that class, I always tried to impress upon my students the importance of presentation in their work and in the media. This has come back to me recently in a couple of different forms. Now that I work with teachers, many of them want websites. The problem is that teachers, like many students, want them to look pretty. The problem is they don’t understand good website design. For example, putting a picture as a tiled background is typically not a good idea as you create a website.
That being said, I’m torn between trying to get teachers to make a website that students can use and has good content on it even though it will burn their irises with black text on a fluorescent green background, or them not making one at all. Website presentation is important, but, as I used to tell my media classes. Content is king. Just look at MySpace. MySpace sites have the most God-awful web design in existence, yet, our students spend an amazing amount of time looking at the crazy backgrounds, blaring music and random comments. Why is that? Partly because of the social side of it, but really, even the social side of it comes down to one thing… content.
So my struggle continues. I’m overlooking some of the “bad design” aspects of sites that I’m helping with so that these sites are actually created and possibly used. Luckily, I’m not the one viewing these sites.
One of the things I do in addition to raising twins and helping teachers is online writing tutoring for Smarthinking.com. This company provides a service in which college and high school students can submit papers and request help to improve their writing. It’s not a proofreading service, but prides itself on helping students become better writers by addressing errors in writing and concentrating on techniques that will help those students become better writers, not just pass that paper. Because of the nature of the company and the fact that most of the virtual tutors are educators, plagiarism is a big concern for us.
Although I’m not in the classroom anymore, I still think like an English teacher and through my role in Smarthinking, I still spend time each week thinking about and critiquing writing. This morning I finally picked up an article that I have been meaning to read for about three weeks. The article is entitled “My Year as a High School Student” by Deborah Waldron and was published in Educational Leadership in March 2006. In this article, she outlines a few observations that she had in the year that she reentered the classroom as a student. The one that I found most interesting, and the one that I tried really hard to address in my classroom was “Reinforce ethics and clarify plagiarism.”
We, as educators, expect students to already know what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. In my initial years teaching, I assumed that my students knew that taking someone else’s work was wrong. I don’t know why I thought they knew this, but I was sure that their previous English teachers had been through this and that they just knew it. I think this is especially true of teachers in other subjects. We as English teachers are expected to go over this, but I as she mentioned in the article, she was in a science class and the class didn’t go over it, they were expected to know it. “Use APA style, and cite your sources. If you plagiarize, you will be given a zero.” are words that so many teachers have uttered, but did they explain what, why and how? Maybe, maybe not.
Regardless, in the age of the Internet and digital information, plagiarism has become significantly easier. How do we help students become responsible digital citizens? One of the places it starts is in our classrooms. Making the assumption that students already know about citing sources, even at the college level, is a myth. At Smarthinking and in the classroom we deal with this regularly, let’s stop making assumptions.
I just found this post from the edtechnot.com blog.
http://edtechnot.blogspot.com/2007/06/waitin-on-world-to-change.html
It will send you to another link also found here. What I found most interesting was the graph as a part of this post. It just makes me think about my role in getting teachers to use technology in their classrooms.
