Discovering Something New

A big part of being on the cutting edge of technology is actually going out there and trying new things.  Luckily, several databases exist to expedite the process.  Still, the amount of websites and applications out there is mind numbing.  For this assignment, I was tasked to discover something new regarding the the web 2.0 tools that are out there.  I utilized the database Go2web20 in order to access new tools because it seemed easier to use with its filters.  Of course, when I started to seek out new sites, my tab bar started to look like this:

It's obvious that there are innumerable amounts of resources available.  Even though the assignment did not require me to evaluate education-specific cites, I did choose one that was education because it is a way for me to sharpen my online skills and fill up my toolbox even more.

After browsing several sites, I came across PowToon, an online cartoon maker.  I actually had been looking for a tool like this before.  I've used GoAnimate! and the recently closed Xtranormal, but I've found that PowToon is really easy to use after playing around with it for a little bit.  The site even has several easy-to-understand tutorials.  Simply enough, I registered via my Gmail account and confirmed through my email.  I did watch the tutorial that popped up after registration and then began to create a PowToon.  The cartoons you make are limited to 5 minutes, so I decided to create one on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey because that is what I am in teaching in my Guidance class.  I would explain the interface as similar to Microsoft Power Point because you have a slides pane on the left and an editing pane in the middle.  See screenshot below.  Many keyboard shortcuts work with the program like Command(CTRL)+C and Command(CTRL)+V for copy and paste.  Some shortcuts like Command(CTRL)+D for duplication and Command(CTRL)+Z for undo (my most used shortcut) did not work.  I ended up spending about 20 minutes creating a PowToon and I really thought it was neat.  I shared the completed video with YouTube and then embedded it into my website underneath the embedded Vokis.  The final part of the review is the most important.  PowToon is a "freemium" site.  Paid accounts allow for more toons, tools, and high quality downloadable videos.  Check out their accounts page.  $48 for a teacher account + 30 students accounts seems fairly reasonable.  Overall, I would say that PowToon was very easy to vet and has a certain educational value for students and teachers alike.

Finding a second site to evaluate was difficult.  I didn't want to just find any old site for the sake of completing the assignment.  I came across ResumUp and tried it out because it seemed interesting.  Several months back, my wife came home and showed me a resume that someone had sent in to her workplace.  It was visual and really interesting.  I think the person who created it used Photoshop and Dream Weaver or some combination of Adobe products.  I'm a total novice when it comes to those programs, so ResumUp intrigued me.  For a while, I've had the idea to create a resume on Prezi or Glogster to demonstrate my Web 2.0-ness.  ResumUp was easy to register for and easy to use.  You simply edited different boxes and put in your own information.  The only part I did not like is that some cities, like Belvidere, NJ or Stroudsburg, PA, did not show up in the pre-population box and therefore those cities would not show up in the resume.  See below.  The site provides the ability to connect with other professionals, find vacancies, and share your resume.  I did not want to share my resume, so I took a screenshot.

My final observation is that this site is geared more for business professionals, not teachers.  It would be interesting if a site like PAREAP or PAEducator would team up with ResumUp to provide this type of service to teachers.  There is definite potential for this site in education because it can be a more fun way to introduce the concept of a resume to high school students.  Overall, the site was fairly easy to use, but I do not know how much I would actually use it.

The third site I chose was Class Dojo.  Once I received Untangling the Web, I thumbed throughout it to see what I was in store for and tried some of the websites out.  After hearing my district's elementary school principal talk about Class Dojo, I figured I needed to try it out for myself.  The sign up process was simple, as most sites are, and I got to work right away.  I'm the kind of person who likes to try out new sites and, THEN, seek out tutorials if I need help.  Class Dojo works in the opposite manner, so that was a bit frustrating to me.  I just like to get in and get to work.  However, after following the instructions I could finally set up a class and import students.  The first day I tried out Class Dojo was Thursday of this week.  I teach a quarterly 7th Grade Computer Science class in which I have them complete typing exercises for the first half of the quarter (an eighth, I suppose).  The particular class I have now has really great students, but they are very chatty.  I offered incentives such as listening to music or playing typing games for the first and/or last 5 minutes of class, but it wasn't until I implemented Class Dojo that I saw them really understand the incentive system.  I simply plugged my projector dongle into my laptop and let them view their scores for the day.  I gave them a +1 if they were on task or a -1 if they were off task.  I said that if they were in the positive for points, they could play typing games at the end of the period.  It worked very well.  The next day, I acquired an iPad from another teacher so I could try the application out (I feel the website version is cumbersome in terms of finding students and then clicking several times to get what you want).  I also printed and distributed the student/parent logins for the students because I thought they could just sign in and view their progress instead of looking up at the projector.  This is one part I do not like about Class Dojo.  It requires that students input a parent's email address.  This was only an experiment for me and I did not want to get phone calls asking what the program was all about, so I aborted that step in the process and just continued the way I had before.  Maybe I misunderstood the process, but the students couldn't change their avatars without a parent's email address.  The only things I would like to see changed is the ability to change the order of students (alphabetical or by seating chart) by dragging their avatars.  I clicked on the "IDEAS" cloud on the bottom of Class Dojo's website and typed in my suggestion for including a seating chart style modification and will report their reply when I receive it.  Overall, Class Dojo was easy to use and is definitely educationally sound for both teachers and students.

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Fill Up Your Toolbox

For this assignment, I was tasked at trying out some newer technologies that enable expediency in the wide, Web 2.0 world :).  The following details my experience and opinions on each site.

The first site I tried out was the URL shortener goo.gl.  Seeing that Google will soon own us all technologically and that I use a Google Site as my primary website, I figured it was the best site with which to become acquainted.  I did check out bit.ly and TinyUrl to compare, but did not find any discernible difference.  I pasted my websites full address (http://sites.google.com/site/hurricanehocking) into the shortener text box, clicked shorten URL, and out came goo.gl/Jezk6l.

This is amazing and solves many problems that I oftentimes run into in class.  Look at my regular URL.  Students sometimes assume to type in www. or think that it is sites instead of site and vice versa.  Of course, once students get to my site, I have them bookmark it so we don't have to go through the painful process again.  Utilizing the URL shortener would mostly solve that problem.  I'm sure all of us would like to have www.ournamehere.com, but domain hosting is quite costly.  One caveat I noticed is that all letters are case sensitive.  The J in the goo.gl URL must be capitalized.  I tried it lower case and it did not work.  It's not a huge deal, but you do need to be very specific.  In contrast, typing in GOOGLE.com or GooglE.com will take you to the same place.

The second site I tried out was the Quick Response (QR) code generator delivr.com.  The site is set up very similarly to the URL shortener sites.  Simply paste a URL into the QR code generator and out comes a QR code.  I figured I would paste my new goo.gl URL in to see if I could blow my laptop's mind with web 2.0 awesomeness, but all it did was simply make a QR code.  Look to the right.

Believe it or not, I actually recently started to use QR codes.  In my Video Productions class, one of the students does a student survey via Poll Everywhere on a weekly basis for our weekly announcement projects.  He just distributes paper with the QR code, URL, and response options and students, during lunch, scan it with their phone and take the poll.  I'll have to mention utilizing the URL shorteners for that so students without a QR reader can participate a little bit easier.  I also envisioned utilizing the QR codes in class with the laptops.  Turns out, most readers for the macs cost money, but I did find one at http://dansl.net/qrreader/ and tried it out.  It didn't work.  Maybe because I do not have a steady hand or even lighting.  That is something I would need to research more before using in class.

The third and final site I tried out was the bookmarklet Quietube.  I was not very familiar with bookmarklets until after learning about them and trying this one out.  This was not as quick a process as the URL shortener or the QR code generator.  I'm a bit ashamed, but I had to watch the tutorial video.  After that, however, I did generate a Quietube URL (http://quietube6.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAYZBS40lcc) for a video I show my Guidance class.  And of course, to simplify things, I created a short URL http://delivr.com/27red (this time with delivr, obviously).  Now that I've tried delivr's generator, I think that the URLs generated are simpler than the other sites.

I do not think that I would use this site that much.  I much prefer to just embed videos on my Google Site.  I do understand the benefits of Quietube, especially if I were to send students a link, but I more like my way.

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Dig Deeper into the Mainstays

As the digital aspect of education evolves, specific sites have led their related genres.  Within this blog post, I will be evaluating Twitter, iPiccy, and Symbaloo from the social, creative, and curation genres, respectively.  I chose each site because I have little to no experience with them and wanted to see how they could be used to expand my digital repertoire.

Twitter is one of the mainstream, mainstay mediums of the social networking genre.  According to its website, Twitter is “The fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about” (2013).  In the past, I did sign up for an account, but did not do much after that.  I understand the lingo involved and all that Twitter entails.  I just never really cared to give it a shot, I suppose.  So I must be doing things the slowest, most difficult way.  I digress.  The educational value of Twitter is evident, both for the classroom and for the professional teacher, independently.  My mind automatically thinks about the impact such an application could have when studying government, economics, or other contemporary social studies.  There is also relevance within studying the past.  Students can create accounts for historical, literary, or scientific figures and “bring them into the modern age.”  In my email interview with EricSheninger (@NMHS_Principal) from New Milford High School, he mentioned the importance of establishing Personal Learning Networks and how Twitter helps enable that (E. Sheninger, personal correspondence, October 31, 2013). 

            iPiccy is an online application that I had never heard of before unwrapping Untangling the Web.  I have used Prezi, Glogster, and VoiceThread somewhat extensively, so I wanted to branch out and learn something new.  Unlike Twitter, I had no experience at all with iPiccy, so I signed up for an account.  Wow!  It is impressive in terms of how much it allows its users to manipulate, filter, and edit their own images and it does not require sign up.  Despite my steadfastness to utilizing new technologies, I have to admit that this is one genre in which my skills are stale.  I typically use Power Point to manipulate imagery, but iPiccy is really advanced.  I think that iPiccy definitely has a place within education, but it is not a featured player.  It seems to act more as a supporting role of other applications.

            Symbaloo is an online curation application that allows users to socially bookmark favorite/important websites and other applicable applications.  I have used the site very, very briefly in another Wilkes EDIM course, so I am revisiting it more as a novice/newcomer.  I really like the layout of the site as it reminds me of my smartphone the way it is set up on a grid with application favicons.  As simple as it seems, organizing bookmarks in a graphic manner is what Symbaloo is all about.  It would be a great choice as a default home page in any browser for both student and teacher.  In my research, I came across the Tech Tips for Teachers Blog and found some interesting uses of Symbaloo.  A user of the blog, Jayme Linton (@jaymelinton), posted about how she uses Symbaloo for online fieldtrips and “webmixes” all different sites for students to explore and how engaging it is for students to be able to go somewhere else (digitally) every day (2013).  Embedding Symbaloo into my Google Site is something that I plan on trying out to give students a graphic visualization of the sites that they use and, of course, allow ease of access instead of typing in long URLs.

            Exploring new sites has always been very enjoyable for me.  I love that feeling that I get when my brain goes into overdrive thinking about how I can use a new tool in the classroom.  The three sites previously divulged will definitely give me something new to try and I am excited to do so.

References

Linton, Jayme (October 24, 2013).  Take your students on a virtual fieldtrip everyday.  [Web log comment].  Retrieved from http://techtipsforteachersblog.blogspot.com/?utm_content=bufferb105a&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

Twitter, Inc. (2013).  About Twitter.  Retrieved from https://www.twitter.com/about

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Using New Technologies

For this assignment, I decided to forego interviewing one of my colleagues and find someone new to interview.  Many of my colleagues do a lot of great things with new technologies, but I wanted to put myself out on a limb and really try to learn something new.  I flipped through Untangling theWeb and stopped on the section on Twitter and pinpointed Eric Sheninger, Principal at New Milford High School in New Jersey.  I emailed him with the questions and he promptly replied.  You can find his contact information at the bottom of this post.

As a principal, Mr. Sheninger has given his teachers autonomy in regards to the choosing and implementing of digital tools.  He gives his teachers time in the school day to develop their own skills and research new tools as well as promotes hands-on training at the Edscape Conference in New Milford.

Taking a seemingly laissez-faire approach towards utilizing new digital tools, the only real obstacle to face is parental permission.  Quite simply, the only requirement Mr. Sheninger asks of his teachers is to have students get their parents to sign a media permission form (page 2).  He shared that document with me in our correspondence and it seemed quite simple.  It was basically an affirmative or negative towards students publishing media (any format really) created within the district with the responsibility of appropriate use falling on the students and the acknowledgement that the district is not responsible for inappropriate use and/or content that is on the Internet.

Mr. Sheninger’s only advice for teachers wanted to replicate his efforts is to establish a Personal Learning Network (PLN).  By doing so, teachers share their ideas and successes for other teachers to benefit and continue a dialogue to improve the skills of all involved.  To explore this idea more, visit KQED’s blog on the top five PLNs.

Mr. Sheninger - @NMHS_Principal - EricSheninger.com - Blog

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Creative Commons Badge and Explanation

I chose to utilize the attribution/non-commercial license because I feel that it is important for all educators to share work.  If someone is able to find a use for my creations, then by all means, please do so.  I in no way admonish those who wish to profit off of their works and respect sites like www.teacherspayteachers.com.  I do, however, believe that attribution is vital to sharing and promoting educational insight worldwide because it puts a name behind a work.  It allows us to understand the human aspect of digital works of those whom we will most likely never meet.  It also opens up an opportunity to a line of communication to further educational study.



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