CrossTeach

Here’s a transcript of the comments I contributed to the final voicethread:

Comment 1: I am more fascinated now with web2.0 than when I started this course.  Fortunately I am much less overwhelmed.  I believe that the world might be changing more for teachers than students.  Sure, kids are growing up in a world they don’t always understand, and their parents don’t always understand either.  But they’re still our responsibility to teach.  So we have to maintain a larger perspective of our own world that includes the sometimes unfamiliar world kids are growing up in so that when we teach them we can reach them with more relevant content and methodology. Our best resource for teaching responsibility to our students is most likely modeling.  Embrace the new technology with visible respect and enthusiasm.

Comment 2: I am in love with delicious.  The ability to organize and archive with super quick ease is amazing.  Searching for related relevant bookmarks is a snap and sharing your link collections just makes sense.  I’ve already shared a set of study tips webpages I bookmarked with some of my advisory students.  I’m also going to be making some huge steps this year to get the majority of my work and my students’ work into the cloud and available for easy access via Google Docs.  This is a continuation of my effort to both remove barriers to evaluation and assessment and also to get closer to paperless.

What I didn’t put into the voicethread was that I was also going to be starting over in a sense; starting with the class webpage/wiki I’ve been maintaining for two years now.  I’m moving the whole thing over to wikispaces after doing a hard assessment of how well the pbworks format works for my students and how much it lets me do with the page.  I feel much more confident about the use and integration of technology into my day to day class instruction and I believe that I will be able to more freely explore the digital medium with wikispaces as my new central hub, especially when expanding into Google blogger and Google docs and the rest of the widgets and embeddable resources like youtube videos and podcasts.  This class has been a great experience, but I will let my future growth be proof of its greatness.

Happy trails to all!

I enjoyed digging around on Classroom2.0.  I felt most at home checking the popular forums and found a post on submitting and returning papers electronically and eventually wandered over to a related post specifically on google docs vs wiki usage. Over in the biology section I found an AP teacher that was trying to start up her AP Bio Ning page and was looking for feedback. Unfortunately, I also found a particularly ridiculous conversation about whether or not light is matter. (Hint: it’s not).  I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly this site has to offer, but I know that if I don’t check back with it from time to time, I’m going to regret it.  It’s likely that this site will help me make the breakthrough on the value of and how to create a valuable PLN.

Ditto those last two sentences for Twitter.  I watched all the videos and followed all the links and watched all their videos and followed all of their links.  Twitter just seems so…abrupt and temporary.  The 30 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom slideshow was a little helpful, but many of the examples were either redundant, or tried to take the place of a face to face interaction without improving the overall interaction.  I feel that I do better setting up a solid RSS that pulls from top bloggers and “archiving” using delicious.  This attitude will probably change once I stop trying to absorb interesting information and start asking questions to the rest of the world. I may have to make officially signing up for a Twitter account my 24th thing.

So as this learning 2.0 class comes to an end, I think we’ve found a common theme for me to address and that is that I need to stop thinking of me…what does this do for me, what can this teach me, how can this help me teach, etc…and I need to start teaching 2.0 where the focus is on using web2.0 to advance student learning…what does this do for my students, how can this draw more students to learning, what does it inspire them to do or create?  I’m not the star in the classroom, the learning is; I’m just there as a facilitator for the students.

So, I’m at a party this past weekend.  Not a crazy party, just the 1st birthday party my friend threw for his kid.  It was a great excuse for everyone to get together and I still can’t believe that he fit 30 adults and kids in his house.  Anyway…the major topic of conversation the whole afternoon was kids.  Your own kids, your nieces, nephews, etc.  I happen to overhear someone talking about their niece and she’s going on and on about a huge variety of ailments this poor kid has…everything from spontaneous body covering welts to irritable bowel syndrome to asthma to hyperactivity to petit mal seizures…up to 200 a week!!!  So my Biology brain kicks in and it’s screaming “All of those conditions have an inflammatory root cause!  She doesn’t have all those diseases at once…they are collectively symptoms of one single autoimmune disease run amok!”  Odds are that the underlying problem is a kind of gluten or gluten/dairy intolerance.  So I ask “Any chance she’s been tested for gluten intolerance or for Celiac disease?”  And then the cursed party silence scenario begins.  Everyone stops talking at once and all eyes are on me.  They’re all giving me the “Okay, John, you’re a smart guy and all but you’re not a doctor.”  All except the person who was telling the story about her poor niece.  She turns to me and says, “Actually the entire family got tested and they all came back positive for Celiac…but the doctors didn’t want to start her on any meds until they did a full autoimmunity workup on her.  Unfortunately since nobody else in the family is having any similar symptoms, the Dad isn’t convinced and doesn’t want to pay the money for the full battery of tests.”  Unfortunately, the Dad’s logic is fairly sound.  More unfortunately, he’s probably dead wrong and his daughter is going to suffer as a result of his not knowing any better.  So the conversation turns away from me diagnosing someone I’ve never met before and the party continues.  Later on I spoke with the person with the ill niece and offered to send her some useful information she could send along to her sister and brother in law that might help explain and help start treating the kid for zero risk and zero cost.  It just so happened that only a few days before three different autoimmunity and celiac related posts popped up in my RSS feeder and I had saved all to my Delicious account for future reference.

http://drhyman.com/gluten-what-you-dont-know-might-kill-you-11/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/how-to-stop-attacking-you_b_657395.html

http://coolinginflammation.blogspot.com/2010/07/autoimmune-diseases-bacteria-and-galt.html

So I guess this post isn’t as much about the information in the articles so much as it’s about information overload finally coming to the rescue when doctors and finances get in the way of helping a kid in need.

I’m glad that the Pageflakes assignment was made optional.  I dug through the example pages and immediately hit sensory overload.  I took a breath and looked again and then it looked like the subject-specific pages were more repetitive than anything else.  I do see the value in creating a single-subject page for a focused research assignment, but the example of the page created to be a classroom homepage really didn’t speak to my brain very well.  Pageflakes is a good idea, but it might need a bit more development before I’m drawn to it instead of overwhelmed by it.  As usual, I probably need some solid examples before my own creativity kicks in.

I have been really enjoying the share and open edit features of Google Docs.  Most recently I created a sign up form for the weight room and it has really made the process much simpler for myself and my athletes.  Nothing’s perfect, but it’s far better than the sheet of paper on the door system used for the past three years.

I am so looking forward to having students create/submit/edit their project-related work on Google docs.  I am excited that it means less paper to shuffle.  I hope that it means fewer “lost/late” assignments.  I wonder if parent access to these documents would be a boon or a whole new issue of boundaries. And oh my goodness I am very very excited to know that the days of 3 people working on a single presentation via 3 different powerpoints but then one person getting sick and their work not being available may be coming to an end!  Let’s not even mention the email storage space that will be saved when I am sent a link to a google doc instead of an attached set of 6-10 graphs from all 70 students when the results section of the science project is due.

I did spend some time playing with the presentations for the first time.  It passed my “can you embed video” test, so I like it already.  As for the drawing tool, I can imagine two students helping each other in real time practice punnet squares for genetics and then sharing a copy with me to have their work checked.

Professional interest video #1 is Part 1 of 5 of a fact to face discussion between Dean Ornish and Gary Taubes.

Professional interest video #2 is a full lecture by Robert Lustig on Fructose metabolism.

How to video:  How to tie a perfect tie by Tim Ferriss himself.

Fun/Nostalgic video:  A fan-made movie trailer for Thundercats.

Here’s a video I’ve used in class several times.

I’m a big fan of using youtube, when appropriate, in the classroom.  Most often I use them when I have reached some kind of personal limit in my teaching.

I don’t do science raps or science songs, but I can find a video of good ones.  Mr. Mathis can’t perform historically significant symphonies or ballet in his AP Euro class, but I can help him find them on youtube to show his class.  I don’t have the skills to create NOVA quality productions on astrophysics, but I can find great videos online that not only give a great explanation, but also tap into the visual curiosity of my students.  In terms of producing video content, I think it’s great for short how to tutorials: how to do a dihybrid cross, how to solve a wavespeed equation, how to calculate the number of electrons required for a plant to produce a molecule of sugar, etc.

Here’s the link to my podcast.

I’ve been listening to Robb Wolf’s Paleolithic Solution podcasts for a while now through his website, s o I’m not completely new to podcasts.  I really enjoy downloading them to my wife’s mp3 player and listening to them in the car instead of the normal radio drivel and commercials.  I find it’s good “dead-time” filler for when I don’t have a book with me.  The only problem so far is that I often hear things I want to remember for including in a lecture and I don’t always have something to write the info down or make a note other than the podcast # and time stamp of the info.  However, I didn’t have any idea how much free science info and lectures was available online via podcasts.

From digging around just a bit on itunes, I learned the following:

1. If you’re going to podcast, get a good mic.  If you’re on episode 20 of your star lecture series and your voice is still scratching…I’m not subscribing.

2. If your Moon & Earth lecture podcast keeps referring to slides in a presentation, either upload the slides or create a video podcast.  I’m talking to you, UC Berkeley.

3. Anyone can have a podcast.  I found one with two ladies spending time each week to make fun of what they saw on Food Network that week that they found irritating…which I found irritating.  Maybe I could make a podcast making fun of them making fun of Food Network?

4. I’m in trouble because I have every intention of listening to every episode of “Wait…wait…don’t tell me” ever recorded.

So my next real education problem is how to get this info out to my students.  Or better yet how to get them to access it.  The old school way would be for me to review it, glean out the best stuff, make it into a new lecture and give it in class.  There’s no way I can do all that and like I said, that’s the old way.  So how do I get them to do and want to do the exploration?  How do I get them willing to click on the podcasts?  How do I get them to select good quality resources without having to go through an approval process for every single student?  How do I…gasp…stop being a teacher and start being a facilitator of learning?

Library Thing looks pretty neat.  It really nailed the recommendations when I tested it using Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  I would definitely use it if I needed to search for a new science related book to read, but my “to be read” pile is usually 3-4 deep at any given time.  I suppose I could use it to share my favorite books or my recommended reading list or my list of everything I’ve ever read.  I’m very pro-reading, but this particular Thing doesn’t seem quite as multi-use as the other Things we’ve been introduced to.  Am I missing something?

Okay…I’m never going to use regular bookmarking ever again.  Delicious is just plain awesome.

As usual, I’m not too sure I want my bookmarked interests shared with the rest of the world, but this makes sorting and retrieving related bookmarks a piece of cake.  The tagging is quick and easy and fairly intuitive. I think I’d like to set up an RSS widget in my own webpage to snag anything tagged with “genetics” or “photosynthesis” for my students to dig in to. “Biology” and “science” seem a bit too broad, but who knows?

I know for sure that I can use it to help all the people that want paleo diet or CrossFit training resources from me.  I can tag all the best sites I know of with some obvious tags like paleo, running, nutrition, and/or workout and with a link to my delicious bookmarks they can simply click the tag that they want to know about.  It should make it easy if they want to search for cholesterol specific diet info as opposed to regular diet links.  Neat!