One Teacher's Thanksgiving Gift to His Students

Those of us who teach classes know how hard it is to keep the students' attention right before a holiday.  Here is how one teacher battled that issue this Thanksgiving.  Matthew Weathers, who teaches math and computer science at Biola University, used a mixture of virtual and digital reality to inject a bit of fun and talk about Thanksgiving in one of his math classes this month.

You can watch his mixed digital/physical self below:

Behold: A Qualitative Creative Commons Image Search Engine

A wonderful new tool I have discovered recently is Behold, which is a search engine for images.

Of course, you can search images with a number of different search engines.  The things that makes Behold different are that:

1.   Behold searches among Flikr photos, particularly those that can be used freely (for non-commerical purposes) under a Creative Commons license (that is, people who are willing to share their photos for non-money-making purposes without the usual copyright restrictions).

2.  Behold somehow filters the photos, and searches among only the million plus photos it considers to be "high quality."

3.  Behold has a way of combining image search tags, so that after you bring up "buildings," you can search for "towers" or "skylines" or other subsets of that tag.

I don't know exactly how it does what it does, but I will say that every search I've done with Behold has come up with professionally-quality photographs, not just any old thing that anybody has taken with a cheap disposal camera.

More importantly, Behold is a source we can use with our students to help them appreciate intellectual property rights.  All too often, students feels like they can just take any image they want from the internet and use it in their own work.  So it is great to direct them to a search engine like Behold where they can restrict their searches to photos where people have agreed to share their creations (under the perimeters of the Creative Commons license).

History of the Internet

For today's middle schoolers, there has always been an Internet and World Wide Web, Macintosh computers and Windows software, Google and Wikipedia.  But most of us teachers can remember when that wasn't so...

The following is a video from 1969, which was the last year of the original TV series, Star Trek, envisioned the connected computer network of the future (albeit in gratingly sexist ways):


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Almost 25 years later, Star Trek was still on...except by now, it was Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.  The Internet was a reality by this point, but was so primitive compared to what our children can even imagine, as shown by this 1993 video:




I think it is great for our kids to see how far computer networking has come in a relatively short time... or, if nothing else, to recognize that distinctive connection noise that those of us using the Internet in the 1990's will never forget...

Sweet Search: The Search Engine for Students

Following on the heels of my recent post about social media that included networking sites designed specifically for the middle school and younger set, I thought I should also spread the word about a search engine designed for students.  Sweet Search is a search engine that has been created by educational researchers specifically for use by students.  Sweet Search produces results from only the 35,000 websites that have been personally "vetted" or visited and approved by actual humans with educational or research credentials, not search bots.  That means that the results of the students information request will be quantitatively smaller (which is generally good for students learning to access and evaluate information they find over the Internet) but qualitatively better.  Only links to sites with respected and appropriate information will be shown--sites like PBS, the Library of Congress, schools and universities, the Smithsonian and other museums, and the like.

For more details on Sweet Search, including a comparison of a typical search on Sweet Search with some other mainstream search engines, see this blog post on Why Sweet Search Is the Best Search Engine for Students.

Sweet Search is designed for middle schoolers and above.  They have another site, SweetSearch4Me, that is geared towards elementary students.

Curriculum Resource: A Google A Day

I've written on this blog before about the importance of knowing how to use Google to find the information we need on the Internet.  I've just recently stumbled upon another way of learning how to use Google effectively; take advantage of the search engine's daily puzzle, A Google a Day.

What this website does is pose, basically, a trivia question.  However, it is a trivia question that usually has several different bits of information that you need to combine in order to answer the question. Here is an example:

After everyday exposure to this element with 82 protons and 126 neutrons, the Huns were the least of the Roman Empire’s problems. This cumulative poison was used as a preservative in what drink?

As this demonstrates, the questions makes students isolate what information they do have and figure out how to use that to get the information the question is seeking.  So this is a great resource because it is teaching the thinking component of the search process, not just giving technical instructions.  However, sometimes they do ask questions that require some advanced searching techniques, such as the ones I mentioned in this post.

Once you answer the question (or give up), the website suggests the items on which to search, or the search techniques to use, in order to get the right answer.  So it can be a stand-alone teaching device for searching techniques.

I don't use this every day, but every so often, I will send one to my son to help develop his searching skills. So, for example, since he is a cephalopod lover, I gave him this one:

All cephalopod mollusks with three hearts are carnivorous, but only one type living in temperate waters is deadly to humans. What does this deadly cephalopod normally feed on?

...which actually turned out not to be a great problem for him, since he already knew the only deadly cephalopod living in temperate waters, and thus didn't have to do a two-level search.  But you get the idea.

Curriculum Resource: Qwiki Is Turning Information into an Experience

I've recently discovered Qwiki, which bills itself as the first company to turn information into an experience.

For example, my son recently gave a short presentation on the Mason-Dixon line for our history coop.  But here is what it looks like as a Qwiki:


You can click on many of the pictures to see them in more detail, or if you watch it on the Qwiki website, you can watch it in "Contents" and see the written text all at once with explanations of the related pictures or videos.  Also on the website is the ability to contribute to the "wiki" part of Qwiki by rating the presentation, giving feedback, or offering additional information or resources to improve the experience.

Apparently, it does all this on the fly, searching the web for open source material such as Wikipedia and putting those items into a computer-generated presentation.  So I think that is pretty amazing.  But they are working on a version that publishers can use to create similar presentations out of their proprietary information sources.  The company recently got $8 million in investment money from people like the co-founders of Facebook and YouTube--the kind of people who know what they are doing in the new world of social digital media.  I think this indicates that Qwiki may be a major player in the next level of digital information packaging over the Web.

Persian Fairy Tales, Small Worlds, Bananas, and the Power of the Internet

I love words (as regular readers of this blog might have realized, since I use so many of them!)  One of my favorite words is "serendipity," which Wikipedia defines as "denotes the property of making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated, or the occurrence of such a discovery during such a search."  And while I have long loved the word, and work it into my conversation and writings as often as is appropriate (another word like it that I love is "cacophonous," which the occasion to use arises, alas, all too often), it was not until tonight that, perhaps inspired by my recent post on the word history game Etymologic, I looked up the derivation of the term.  (Man, what a sentence.  And while I think it is grammatically correct, my homework is to try to diagram it.  It's what I tell my son to do, so I need to follow my own advice.)

Anyway, it turns that, according to my favorite etymology resource, the Online Etymology Dictionary, that serendipity was actually coined by a specific person--namely, Wallace Walpole--on a specific date--January 28, 1754.  He said he created it from a Persian fairy tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip," within which the protagonists "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."

So I don't know what worked for the ancient Persians, but my favorite vehicle for serendipity these days is the good old hyperlinked World Wide Web.  I can easily begin with a simple task (like looking up the etymology of the word serendipity) and get lost for 30 minutes in Persian literature and foreign languages and translation difficulties and who knows what else.  But blogging is a particularly great vehicle for these serendipitous encounters, as people seek out your site while you seek out their posts, based on some common interests.

That happened to me today when, in following up a comment someone made on one of my posts, I discovered a marvelous resource.  Another homeschool mom out there is writing a great blog about her homeschooling adventures under the name of SmallWorld at Home.  I'm not sure where the name comes from, but to me it brings to mind William Blake's wonderful words:

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

Maybe that's just me, who has 19th century poets on the brain as we study them along with our 19th century history--but what a lovely way to describe what we do as homeschoolers, and, really, as parents in general.

But more to the point, however, is the fact that this past week, we've spent a lot of time on writing--fiction, non-fiction, and quasi-fiction (see my son's blog, The Madisonian Blog, to see how easily he can morph one into the other).  Specifically, we have been working on mastering the Five Paragraph essay.  He is taking a class at our homeschool coop on this topic, where the teacher has been doing a masterful job of trying to move the students from their preferences for storytelling to the tighter format of an essay. But the real work needs to be done at home, where they do their actual writing.  So we've done draft after draft after draft on my son's essay, which is about the history of bananas (which turn out to be a fascinating not fruit, but technically an herb).

So what do I find at SmallWorld at Home but a very useful post on writing an essay, with this oh-so-validating comment:

If you spend a whole year perfecting the 5-paragraph essay and its various types (descriptive, narrative, expository, persuasive, etc.), you'll have accomplished much of what is covered in a basic freshman composition class.  Imagine how far ahead your student will be if he is familiar with the format in middle school and fluent by high school!

So bless you, SmallWorld mom!  It's worth all the time and effort after all....

If you want to read her resources about writing essays, click here to read that post.  She also has a whole wonderful series about creative writing that is especially geared to beginning and reluctant writers.  Look at this neat link she has created for that resource:







So I'm really grateful that I live in a time of technology-facilitated serendipity, and for the support I get for my journey from all these other bloggers and web writers whose insight I soak up, even if we never meet.

Christmas Blog 2010: Digital Nativity

We have had a lovely holiday, and hope that you all have as well.

Here is a video I plan to use in Sunday School tomorrow (if we don't get snowed out).  My theme is that different cultures have told the Nativity story in their own way, regardless of what the "truth" is about the actual event.  But this video tells the story for our YouTube/Twitter/Google (etc.) generation.

Again, best wishes to all, and I hope you enjoy this new take on an ancient story.

Reason #522 Why I'm So Glad I Have a Mac

I love the Apple computers.  I think they design them well, and ship them out with software already on there (that works together seemlessy) to do most of what the average user wants to do with a computer.  I particularly appreciate their multimedia software, which creates incredible things but is definitely easy enough for a middle school student to master.

But here is today's story about what it so great to have a Mac.

Last night I was working on my laptop, and a warning came up saying that my battery power was almost up and to save my work.  However, I was plugged in.  I hadn't noticed that the charging unit was not lighting up, which meant that the computer was not getting the energy it needed.

So I went through the process defined as "insanity" in the real world, but is standard operating procedure for computers:  I kept trying the same thing and expecting a different result.  I unplugged and replugged both ends, then did it again, rebooted, jiggled and jostled, and eventually the light came on, so I kept working on it for a couple of hours (but to moving around a lot for fear another position might lose the power again).

The next morning, around 10:00 AM, I turned  on the computer, connected it to the charger unit, and--nothing coming from the charger.  This time, I went through my troubleshooting sequence to figure out the problem--but to no avail.

So I logged on, and by 10:30 I had an appointment that afternoon at 12:15 at the closest Apple store's Genius Bar (Apple's term for technical support).  I was there a little before 12:15 and by 12:30, I was walking out of the store with my laptop and my brand-new recharging apparatus (and for free, too, because the old one was still under warranty).  So in under three hours, I got the answers I needed and the problem was solved.  Plus, I wasn't the only one; while I was waiting, I saw one guy come in with an iPod that needed something done (which they fixed, another walk out with a virgin iPad because the batter on the one he bought on opening day was having a problem with its batter, another woman whose machine wouldn't boot up until the Apple Genius worked his magic, etc.

The point is, when you have a problem, you can arrange to go see a real, life person, find out what the problem really is, and get it resolved, usually pretty immediately.  As much as I depend on the computer, both in my homeschooling and in my everyday life, I would hate having to spend weeks mailing off parts and waiting to hear what the problem is.  That convenience of having someone to talk to and/or deal with these problems is just so wonderful to me.

What Will Your Middle Schoolers Do With Their iPads?

We were at a post-Halloween costume party tonight where one person came with a shirt with a built-in iPad holder that displayed video on his iPad that was part of his costume.  It was really incredible!  But it got me to thinking about what other ways our middle school students will be using this type of technology--especially ways we might never even imagine they would.

So I came home and we (my middle school son and I) googled some of the most ingenious uses for the iPad.  Some categories that really caught our attention/imagination were:

• Artists are using iPads in their creations.  Some of the standout videos you can see are
• the artist David Kassan making incredible portraits of studio models...using only one finger
• Chinese piano prodigy Lang Lang playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the iPad
• a magician, instead of pulling a rabbit from a hat, pulls a dove, a piece of cheese, and lots of money from their images on the iPad
• People are using iPads to entertain and communicate with their animals.
• aquatic researchers in Mexico are finding dolphins can communicate with iPad by touching it with their beaks
• pets, particularly cats, seem intrigued with the colors, displays, and apps available on the iPad, sometimes even when the owners aren't there
• Some people are using it for more practical, everyday uses.  A couple of examples include:
• attaching it to the door of a cabinet in the kitchen to use to access recipes or cooking instructions while one's hands are occupied doing the actual food preparation
• wearing it on your back when biking to inform cars behind that you intend to do (like turning or stopping)
• hanging it around your neck at a convention with a default image of a giant name tag (presumably with the person's actual name), but available at a moment's notice to take notes of people met or presentations attended

This is not to suggest that any of us actually want to use an iPad or similar technologies in this way.  But I think it is a sign that our children may be using these tools in ways that we never imagined. My friend and colleague Maria D. and I have been talking a lot about divergent thinking lately, and I think this is one avenue where our children's divergent thinking may really manifest itself in an important and powerful way.  And if it is important and powerful enough....well, then our retirement may be much sweeter than we anticipated.

Note:  So this post really refers to any of this type of emerging technology, not just the iPad per se.  But I will admit that our family is all Mac, all the way.