The book “I Was Vermeer” by Frank Wynne got me thinking…

It’s about Han van Meegeren, a great 20th century art forger. The story exposes “fine art” as arbitrarily defined by critics. Talent is prerequisite, not predeterminer.  The book went a long way toward defining art.

The prosecutor at van Meegeren’s trial said, “The primary function of art is to rouse emotion in the viewer.” He was speaking of fine art.

Art in general terms, as opposed to “fine art,” is rather broad. Writing, design, drawing, photography, music, mashups, sampling, typography, page setup, display and organization, are ALL aspects of artistic expression. Expression being anything which can be interpreted. Even street signs are designed.

When one looks, everything interpreted has artistic elements.

In some ways, everything is art.

In a world in which most of the media’s audience have become producers, knowing that fact is important.

DEFINING THE VALUE OF ART:

At my school our primary use of technology publishing is in 5th grade. “Think about writing to a specific audience.” “Can we choose pictures to better tell your story?” “Are there better videos to embed, which help the reader understand?” “Could we choose colors which are less distracting?” “Look for music which fits your message and audience.” Teachers are directing students–during social studies.

Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” In the 20th century, the real question was how to remain an artist while going through modern education. “Art” has been considered an elective. “You’ll never make money as an artist, dear. Better concentrate on math.”

Looking at Powerpoint, Online Video, Blogging, Flickr, Blip and Twitter one quickly comes to the realization that everything is art. The challenge now is, how to train our children to be better and better artists.

Teachers are falling in line, and one reason it’s working: Nobody has said out loud, “But all this stuff is art!”

God forbid, because in education, art is both worthless and calling it art relegates it all the weekly art “special.”

Whatever we don’t call it, the issues and skills sets used to communicate online, are all from ART.

ART AND PLAGIARISM:

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” — Salvador Dali

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” — Paul Gauguin. It also could be both, or neither. Well timed plagiarism (using Gauguin’s meaning as a copy of style) can be a cultural phenomenon–a social meme, a viral sensation. Artistic revolution never seen, isn’t.

Many bloggers (see Tumblr) are simply self-styled “curators.” They openly post things they find on the web into their blogs.  It’s called “CopyPasta” in the vernacular of the Internet. Those bloggers who curate sites of other peoples’ photos, statements and posts are creating a thing in itself.  A thing with a unique point of view.

“Forgeries are an ever-changing portrait of human desires. Each society, each generation, fakes the things it covets most,” wrote Mark Jones in Fake? The art of Deception. And Marshall McLuhan said, “Art is anything you can get away with.”  In today’s digital economy, copying the art one covets most, is very easy to get away with.

Taking and using people’s copyright is a problem indeed, but is it art? I would say, definitely.

The forger van Meegeren was clearly an equal of Vermeer in the eyes of the critics. On trial for selling an authentic Vermeer to the Nazis, van Meegeren had to expose himself.  When asked to prove the claim he had forged so many accepted Vermeers by copying a Vermeer in front of witnesses, van Meegeren said anyone could copy an existing painting of a great master. Instead, he forged an original Vermeer. When finished, the critics agreed.

Are forgeries art? I would say yes.

EXPOSURE TO THE CRITICS:

“Painting: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.” — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary. Writing and other multimedia production could work within the same definition.

Is the beauty of a spiderweb in the morning dew, art? Probably not.When two people happen upon the spiderweb and both start arguing over why it is beautiful. Is that art? How about if one of them takes a snapshot (not some artsy photograph) of the spiderweb, frames it on their wall, and then two others start arguing over why the picture is beautiful? Well then sure, that’s art. But is it the photo or the spiderweb that’s art? Clearly the spider did most of the work. If it is a straight snapshot, it would really be a question.  One could say the photographer “recognized” it as art, but what is the art recognized? At what point along this continuum does the “art” happen? Perhaps when people start to discuss the interpretation.

In many ways, when the interpretation of something can be criticized, it becomes art.

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” — Jonathan Swift

With many blogs and other Internet publishing being so personal, it sometimes seems the critics are all in confederacy against one, but it is the nature of art.

What we, the new producer class, create–are things to be interpreted.  Almost everything on the Internet is open to criticism, and getting used to that criticism is one of the real-world lessons for writer/producers on the web.

On the Internet, “comments” is a ubiquitous feature from photos to blogs, from wiki pages to mapping tours. Comments are something we need to teach children to moderate–which comments does one approve, respond or delete? Dealing with critics is part of digital literacy. It certainly is a reality our children will encounter, as all of them will have a significant digital footprint entering middle school.

OVERCOMING THE CRITICS:

“To be one’s self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.” — Irving Wallace, Saturday Evening Post.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”– Theodore Roosevelt

It takes courage to produce, even more when there are critics ready to criticize.

WE ARE VERMEER:

Anyone who communicates in this modern world is an artist. You are either a good artist or a bad artist, but an artist you are–like it or not. We are all artists, and our students who are publishing are artists. To acknowledge this in our pursuit of education and technology publishing, will help everyone.

There is a proposal to our School Board that recommends extending the school day for a half hour from March 8, 2010 to June 21, 2010 and converting the April 12th teacher workday to a regular school day for the kiddos.

This was my facial expression upon hearing that proposal ...

I can’t begin to tell you what a negative impact that will have on learning, with the students, parents and teachers in psychological free-fall after the storm. We still can’t park, and folks can barely drop off and pick up their kids.  I can assure everyone, absolutely NO learning will take place during that 30 minutes at the grade school level.  Kids below the age of 12 are maxed out in school as it is.  They are burned out by 3pm.  It will tire out the students and teachers and reduce teacher planning time.  The additional last half hour to make up for snow-days will just be baby sitting to cross off a bureaucratic check box.

Our Hero:  In steps the newly minted president of the local union who points out the law clearly states if the Governor declares a state of emergency (which he did) the law says the school board can request a waiver from the state Board of Education.  A fact oddly missing from the proposal memo, in part, titled “Key Points.”  I mean, I would call that a “Key Point,” wouldn’t you?

The union is urging everybody (parents and teachers) to contact their School Board representative and tell them how this decision would impact them. I say, why the heck not.

You need to be a serious astronomy nerd for this to make any sense. www.exosolar.net for more…

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Dorothea Lange

This can be said of any technology used for education …

The objective is not to teach our students how to use the technology.  It’s to teach them what, by using the technology, we all can learn about interacting with our world, our learning and our interpretation of things.

Tim Stahmer over at Assorted Stuff has a lot of bad things to say about Interactive White Boards (IWB) being “wastes of money and time.” Pointing to the teacher just using the IWB while students watch. I would agree in this instance there is a problem with the teachers, not the technology.

But there are many classrooms here in this Title One K-5 school outside Washington, D.C. where I teach, using IWBs well.

I’m a big believer in letting groups of kids work together using technology.

The killer app for IWB is the fact that groups of students can easily cooperate using a single GUI.

A video worth watching (you can skip the first 7:30 minutes and still get the point):

See Sugata Mitra’s explanation of his “Hole in the Wall” project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids.

In K-3, Interactive White Boards are a tool with which the whole class can do joint computing.

*1st graders using the edit function in MovieMaker to order the elements of a story and produce a video – together as a group of five. Some pushing the video around, some giving advice.

*K group of students building a photostory, for creating stories with a middle beginning and end. The group includes a special needs student who can interact using the computer running the smartboard and intellikeys – so they’re an equal in the process.

*1st graders Skyping as a class with another classroom and jointly doing voicethread.

Kids naturally work together and learn from one another. The tactile nature and large screen of IWB are ideal for fostering sharing of tech learning in the K-3 environment.

Tim is correct, there are many bad uses, but let’s not throw the babies (K-3) out with the bathwater (IWBs).

And perhaps, if teachers in middle school can look away from the worksheet model for just a moment, they might come up with some good uses too.

Principals are starting to ask their Information Technology Resource Teachers for a list of what children should know regarding technology at each grade.

My answer, “Well, it’s changing every six months. Children are learning this stuff at earlier and earlier ages. Two years ago, there were perhaps one or two 3rd graders who had created a MySpace page at home and three or four 4th graders who worked with online communities on gaming or other interests. Last year that type of skill set climbed into the double digits among 3rd and 4th graders. It is increasing exponentially in 4th and 5th grade and getting pushed down into 2nd and 3rd grade.”

I continued by saying, “I’m teaching them as fast as I can. Every year we are pushing what we teach down a grade level. Typing classes start in Kindergarten. So every six months such a list would change, because we are bringing our kiddos along so fast.”

I know, a bit of an ego, but it works at this school where everybody is a bit of a type-A …

Howard Rheingold brings us an expert.

Here Mimi Ito talks about her findings of interviews with hundreds of students on their use of technology in such a detached way. “Theoretical” and “academic” are words that come to mind.

Yet, we are doing much of the advanced stuff of which Ito talks here at this little K-5 Title One school outside Washington, D.C.. For the last two years we have had 5th graders creating webpages, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and using photosharing sites, producing video and audio media and embedding that media into their webpages.

Ito talks of a small minority of kids who “geek out” using media tools to fashion their own statements and expressions in an interactive way.

We just call it Social Studies.

One of the many hats I wear is that of an Information Technology Resource Teacher (ITRT) at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.

It’s a little break-fix, a lot of training teachers how to use their tools in teaching and with the kids.

Jenny said yesterday she could never do my job because “the job description sucks.”

My response was, “Wait a second! There’s a job description?!?!”

I don’t mind. I like it this way. It’s more like the journalism career I had. My favorite job in news is working the editorial desk. Like any good job, being an ITRT it is defined by the person who fills it and the needs of the environment in which they work.

The mission statement is simple. “Get teachers and students using more technology to reach their goals.”

This means:

1)Everything’s got to work, 98% of the time.

2)And as a separate issue, Teachers have to trust everything is going to work 98% of the time.

3)Teachers have to work in a constructivist teaching model in which the students can bring their spectacular background knowledge in personal technology to bare on their learning. This means teachers taking the role of guide rather than expert.

4)Create professional development environments through which teachers use the technologies one wants them to use in the classroom.

Simple, n’est-ce pas?

Of course, to get working gear in this financial environment there’s a LOT of administrative behind-the-scenes shenanigans one has to paddle through.

Here’s the thing. The more the teachers start to use advanced technology in their teaching, the more there is to do. Small-minded people think ITRTs who work hard are “working themselves out of a job.” I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. Teachers learn to blog, then they learn wikis, then voicethread, and before you know it, they are Skyping with a classroom in another state or country using voicethread to critique one another’s art. Get 10 classrooms doing some version of this and the day of an ITRT is never slow.

Somebody extracted the untamed Id (see Freud for definition) of a middle school boy in Social Studies class and hired it as a writer for this website. See: Hannah Duston. (Caution, the website gets a PG-13 for language, graphic historical story-telling, and unbridled adolescent maleness.)

The Challenge:
Our 4th and 5th grades (12 classrooms, 230+ some students and 17+ teachers and specialists) want to start a single school newspaper.  They are requesting an online work-flow allowing students to write but not publish, teachers to approve and publish.  The look and feel should be of a newspaper, not a blog.  They at first want to print the paper to distribute to students and families, rather than it being an online publication.

Draft Solution:
We can use the work flow process provided by the blogging software Wordpress. Students would be given the role of “contributors” and 20 teachers and specialists “editors” or “administrators.” We could use a newspaper looking theme (14 different options can be perused here.) The newspaper could be viewed online or printed out and distributed.

To Publish Online or Not Online:
The 5th grade does a long-form research and publishing project each year which employs all sorts of social and publishing mediums such as blogs and wikis.

We have an Internet Security Protocol which has three components:

1)Don’t provide any personal details (name, school, county, state, country).
2)Don’t allow any incoming communication channels (no comments or text surveys) the only exception being radio button surveys.
3)And we tell students, “Never meet anyone in real life you only met online.”

Thus having students work in a “live” online environment is not a stretch.  Research two years ago found a majority of 4th grade students were actively publishing online (Facebook, MySpace) on their non-school time and equipment.

However, most of the teachers engaged in this project are viewing this as a traditional printed newspaper.  They seek to print the document and distribute a printed version.  This provides another layer of security because nothing will go out unless it is printed and copied multiple times.

Summary:
1)Blackboard is difficult to use and has none of the work-flow needed for this large-scale project.  Blackboard forces students to have their name or student id number on everything they publish (which in violation of our safety practices).  The blog and wiki elements of Blackboard are not viewable by families.

2)Wordpress is a solid solution from a work-flow standpoint and allows teacher and different groups of students to have different roles in the editorial process.

3)Installing Wordpress inside the firewall will make it more secure in the short-term to make sure nothing is published without being scrutinized by a teacher.  It gives teachers, especially those with no blogging experience, more comfort to know nothing will go out that is not printed first.

4)However Wordpress inside the firewall is not future proof.  It doesn’t allow for a change of heart which would allow for the paper to be published online.  This option of online publishing is one all real newspapers are now engaged.  The backup of data on an internally running installation of Wordpress would be dodgy.

5)Wordpress outside the firewall has all the benefits of Wordpress inside the firewall and allows for future proofing in several ways:

a)It allows students to access the newspaper’s editorial features from anywhere.

b)It allows the published items to be viewed by anyone anywhere.

c)It requires students adhere to online safety publishing guidelines listed above.  Students could use pen names and the school’s nickname could be used in lieu of the school name.  Everything else could be open.

We will be thinking on this over the next few weeks with the teams in question.

Here’s yet another brag on our school.   Our school is what Title One should be modeled upon. We are like a Charter Title One school in many ways, because we take the money the government provides for low income learners and run with it past what many are doing in schools in more well-to-do areas.

A Title One Heaven.

DateLine:  At a small school in Virginia …

A 1st grade teacher here at Title One Heaven shows her class Mo Willems books.  She participates in an internet interview of Mo Willems her class watches.

The students decide (with our Librarian) to write a pigeon book in the style of Mo Willems.

After writing it with the Librarian, the 1st Grade teacher creates a voicethread (inserted below) of the book written, illustrated and voiced by the students.

But then she goes one step further, and goes social. She sends the voicethread to Mo Willems website and it is posted.

That’s what I’m talking about!!! Reading, Writing, Art and Technology fueled by social media.

Title One Heaven.

21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020 is a post in Teach Paperless, a blog by Shelly Blake-Plock.  It’s a great blog about teaching.  I love how this guy thinks.

I’m reading this post in teachpaperless and I’m thinking, “Why write about it, just do it.” (I know, to share, to share …)

Here’s the list from Teachpaperless of 21 things that will be obsolete over the next 10 years, and what we (at a Title One elementary school outside Washington, D.C.) are doing about them today.

I’ve put the items teach paperless stated would be obsolete in bold.  I agree with all of them, save two (numbers 8 & 9).

The following is not bragging, I’m just stating the facts about the school at which I’m lucky enough to work:

1. Desks: A 5th grade teacher here removed all desks from her room two years ago.  She did a research project to track data on student performance.  She has not asked for the furniture back.

2. Language Labs: Hah! Forget ESOL, try finding an ETMT student (English as Their Mother Tongue).  This whole school is a language lab, and if the demographers are correct so will be most U.S. schools in the future.  We don’t have a separate language lab as a result.

3. Computers: The majority of our computers are laptops, and going forward we are trying the netbooks and the next step.  School-system finances and classroom real estate both being at a premium, small and mobile is where everything is going, not just computing.

4. Homework: We’re going 24/7 using Blackboard (2 & 3) in the lower grades and wordpress/blogspot & wikispaces in the upper grades (3, 4 & 5).  Students are doing work at home without being asked.  That’s the real power of social media.  A 5th grade teacher is currently doing educational research on best practices for homework, which is NOT the way it used to be done, more along the line of teachpaperless.

5. Standardized Tests: This is a hot topic, the details of which I will cover in an upcoming post.  But we are very much moving toward portfolios as a large percentage of our students (compared with other schools) do a portfolio replacement test for the standardized tests.

6. Differentiated Instruction as Unique: We’re already far beyond this and our teachers differentiate due to language, learning styles and/or special needs.  We have an inclusive model which requires real and meaningful differentiation as a fundamental baseline to everything happening in a classroom or other part of the school, rather than an afterthought or “something the special ed teacher do” (which unfortunately is what many teachers around the world think).

7. Fear of Wikipedia: We use it as a method to teach critical reading skills. And by “critical” we mean “with a discerning eye.”

*8. Paperbacks: Here is the one thing with which I don’t agree.  Radio was to be the end of newspapers, and radio theater the end of paperbacks.  Television was to be the end of Radio, and Computers the end of everything that came before.  People will consume information in a way that is most useful and although the percentage of market share changes we have a ways to go before books go the way of papyrus scrolls.

*9. Attendance Offices: Bio scans are great, but there will still be a frazzled office person handing out tardy slips and calling home to confirm children’s whereabouts.

10. Lockers: Well, didn’t need them anyway.

11. IT Departments: According to TeachPaperless, IT Departments will have more time to innovate as they give up control and budget-line to shared-open solutions.  A lovely sentiment, and clear-headed if one remembers fondly how there didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge of IT on the Star Ship Enterprise.  But the thought of the obsessive, slightly asburger-y engineers (the norm in most IT departments) being “innovative”, well, let’s not be silly now.

12. Centralized Institutions: He’s right on the mark.  He’s talking about school buildings being like a factory where students show up for a shift.  I would also include decentralizing central offices.  “Employees who do not spend at least 10 hours a week with student should be sacked,” is a budget solution suggested by one of the teachers at my school.  All “central office” types should be housed in schools. That way they might accidentally run into a student every now and then.  At our school we house central office types, and it helps them understand the school and students, and helps us by having them more accessible.

13. Organization of Educational Service by Grade: We’re already doing this by necessity, because when one successfully differentiates, it’s done.

14. Education School Classes that Fail to Integrate Social Technology: I agree, but would reword this to say the following will be obsolete in two years, “Education School Classes that Can Successfully Continue to Keep Social Technology Out.” (I mean MiFi kind of screws up all the “firewall technology” on which we are currently spending money.)

15. Paid/Outsourced Professional Development: Our school has a specific model which is co-teaching, coaching and inclusive.  One can walk into any room at any time and nobody bats an eyelash.  The kids and teachers are used to constant traffic.  This raises the bar, because no one can go into their room, shut the door and come out in June.  Professional accountability which includes an AP coming in twice a year is ridiculous.  Constant feedback on everything at all times is what professional development is now and going forward.  Implementing it is the hard part.  We have.  There’s still a place for Paid/Outsourced PD, but the guts of our PD is inhouse PLC, and it works.

16. Current Curricular Norms: We’re doing this, but it is easier in a K-5 environment.  Differentiation demands it.

17. Parent-Teacher Conference Night: More and more classroom blogs are cropping up at my school. These keep the parents in the loop in an ongoing way.  One instance (not at this school) is an individual blog being used for a special needs student instead of a journal they take from home to school and back.  The dialog is deep and meaningful and discrete.  A reality to which I think Blake-Plock is alluding.

18.Typical Cafeteria Food: We’ve made no great inroads here, but one can only hope.

19. Outsourced Graphic Design and Webmastering: Here again is a tension between the creative flow in a school and the need of many DIT departments to assert control claiming “Internet Security” as the cover.  In the future, with social media becoming a utility, and technology becoming ubiquitous, “Internet Security” emanating from within a technology department as a firewall or other technology will not be possible.  “Internet Security” will principally be achieved through behavior management by education of students from Kindergarten forward.  Our 3rd and 4th graders are doing MySpace and Facebook pages at home already.  They are doing google pages, blogspot and wordpress at school.  Given the tools, they could do what Blake-Plock is suggesting next week, but current technology setup of our formal graphic design and webmastering prevents this.

20. High School Algebra I: OK, well, N/A for this K-5 school.

21. Paper: In the last three years, we have moved from a deskjet at every teacher’s desk to a small set of networked centralized printers.  Paper use (and toner) has declined exponentially.

Thanks to Blake-Plock and TeachPaperless.blogspot.com for everything they are doing to support the mission.

Internet Security

A good reminder about passwords is important from time to time:

1) Passwords should be six characters or longer.

2) Incorporate random capital letters, swaps letters for numbers (like vanity license plates) and includes a symbol or two. The password “password” (which you should not use) is much stronger as “r1Va’5paZZw8rD.”

3) Don’t use names of pets, children or streets. It’s better to use a phrase, song lyric or line from a poem as the base. “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad” could become “d9n’Tmak%6aad.” Base the password on the first letter of each word, turning the lyric into “HJ,dmi6.”

For more, read Microsoft’s advice.

For those of you with Macs, get 1password, it is a program that saves all your passwords and backs them up.  That way, you will never forget a password.

To make things easier, use the same username for everything.

And the security wonks aren’t going to like the next thing I’m going to say:  Here’s the main thing.  If what you are doing isn’t about money, use the same password for everything.  It’s not worth trying to remember.

But with 1password you don’t have to.  I use an independently generated 26 alfa-numeric  password for everything.  1password is a beautiful thing.

Mark

Thanks to those folks who sent in suggestions on improving this list. Your comments are welcome.

1) Mozilla Firefox is a “nondenominational” web browser.  Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser pushes users toward Microsoft products.  Apple’s Safari browser is very light on its use of computer resources, but also light on its features.  Mozilla Firefox is superior to both in that it does not push users toward specific products and is so feature rich, Microsoft is starting to fashion it’s browser IE after Firefox.

2) Delicious Social Bookmarking is the best way to manage website links.  This links to a page which explains social bookmarking, How to Social Bookmark.

3) Blogs are Internet resources which are great for publishing and managing student work.  This links to a page which explains blogs, What’s a Blog.

4) Wikis are Internet resources which allow multiple users to edit documents, make lists, and coordinate information.  This links to a page which explains wikis, What’s a Wiki.

5) Twitter is a “micro blogging” site. It is one of the best ways for teaching teams to maintain instant and ongoing communication throughout a busy day.  Twitter has the benefits of instant messaging, while maintaining a record of what is communicated so the information can be read whenever a team member has a free moment.  Here’s a short video explaining twitter.

6) Tagging is the new way of organizing digital items online.  Tagging is a way of putting multiple lables on items such as documents, photos, audio files, etc.  One can then pull similarly tagged items.  The truly interesting thing is in most online environments tags are not centrally organized.  Users choose which labels they place on digital objects.  The distributed nature of this organizing tool creates a more social form of organizing large amounts of data.  This links to a page which explains tagging, Wikipedia on Tagging.

7) Snagit is a product which can be purchased and downloaded to a user’s computer. SnagIt is a screenshot program that operates under the Windows operating system contains most features needed (scrolling page screenshots and automatic ‘trim edges’ function, for example). SnagIt Accessories extends its features. For example, Flickr Output enables the user to upload screen capture onto one’s own Flickr account. The ease of use, comprehensive features makes it one of the best cut and paste software packages available.

8) Flickr.com online photo storage allows photos to be shared and organized with tags.  One can also search thousands of copyright free photos organized by tags.  Here’s a link to a page that explains social photosharing.   Here’s a link to the flickr site for the National Zoo, www.flickr.com/nationalzoo. Two other important source of photos are Wikimedia Commons and the Morguefile.

9) Audacity is a free program that allows anyone to easily make digital audio recordings.  Digital recordings can be rendered in MP3 files (like what are used on iPods).  Any digital recording can be called a “podcast” even if it is only stored on a computer or website.  Here’s a short video explaining podcasting.

10) PhotoStory3 is a free program that allows anyone to easily make a presentation out of digital photographs.  PhotoStory3 allows users to add titles, narration, background music and different focusing and other effects on the photos and transitions between the photos.  Digital photo stories can be rendered as windows media video.  A wmv digital video file can be posted on a website, inserted in a blog, wiki and/or PowerPoint.

11) Photos can be edited with any number of photo editors.  There are rudimentary photo editors within free resources such as Flickr.com, PhotoStory3 and commercial software packages for photo editing such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements and even in some children’s educational software such as Imageblender.  There are also some free online options including Picnik (http://www.picnik.com) and Photoshop Express (http://www.photoshop.com/).

12) Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software included in Microsoft Windows. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

13) Discovery Education Streaming is a subscription service which has a)full videos, b)video segments, c)high quality still photos, d)audio clips and other media elements organized by key word and grade level.

14) Gcast.com is a free Internet site for creating and posting podcasts.  Podcasts posted on Gcast can be linked to from any web resources (blog, wiki, etc.) and reviewed multiple times from any computer or handheld device with an internet connection.

15) Youtube.com has many useful and educational video resources.  They are searchable via keyword.

16) Teachertube.com is an educational resource of videos modeled on youtube but subject specific to education.

17) iTunes is a free product which one can download onto their desktop.  It allows digital audio files to be organized and shared with others.  Audio files stored on Gcast.com can be lists on iTunes for any iTunes subscriber to download and play on their computers, iPods and/or telephones.  iTunes begins to cost users money when they purchase items from the iTunes store.

18) RSS feeds can be found on almost all websites, blogs, wikis, photo sites, and other resources on the web.  Users can subscribe to the RSS feeds for Internet resources they wish to regularly track.  Updates to those internet resources are sent to the subscribers via the RSS feeds and organized in what are called RSS Readers.

19) Google.com has many features besides gmail and the search engine.  Three specific elements are Google Sites, Google Reader and Google Earth.  Google Pages allows anyone to create multiple websites as easily as constructing a PowerPoint.  Google Reader allows anyone to follow any number of websites, blogs, wikis and other resources on the web by subscribing to their RSS feeds.  Information from those RSS feeds are then gathered into the user’s Google Reader page and displayed like email. Google Earth is one of the best mapping tools for education available.

20) Internet safety focuses on four main concerns: 1) Internet bullying, 2) Internet predators, 3) Internet identity theft and 4) Internet negative identity profiles impacting college entry and career opportunities.  All four of these aspects of Internet safety can be covered with two safety principles.  The first is to keep one’s personal information secret.  This includes name, contact information, work and school information, family information and the names of associates.  The second is to never meet anyone in real life, who one has only met on the Internet.  With these two principles, students (and teachers) can protect themselves from the major Internet safety concerns.

21) Publishing on the Internet can be done professionally while maintaining the safety of students and colleagues by following APA publishing guidelines.  By combining the APA ethical guidelines (no student identifiers, no school identifiers) with the Internet safety principles of keeping the author’s identity secret, a great deal of professional practice can be shared in an online professional learning community without fear of breaching our professional ethics.  You can review APA Ethic’s Code here.  Clairvoy is dedicated to teachers publishing strategy.  See more here.

22) Students with different learning styles (visual learners, audio learners, etc.) can better explore Blooms Taxonomy of cognitive objectives by working with the curriculum using the different media available to them in a digital environment.

23) Copyright is important and must be respected at all times.  The copyright laws regarding special education do allow for materials being used in class (which have been purchased) to be adapted to meet the needs of student IEPs.  This can call for teachers to use all the digital tools at their disposal to adapt standard text, photographic and multimedia resources to meet the needs of student IEPs.  Anyone can do this adaptation for the teacher’s needs, including students inside and outside the classroom.  Here are a number of online resources on use of copyright in the classroom.

24) Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

25) Google Earth is a tremendous tool. Hardware such as Flip video cameras (under $100), student digital still cameras, color scanners, document cameras, transferring video from camcorders to computers (Firewire pcmcia card cost around $20  / some analogue to digital video converters cost less than $50), SMARTBoards and iPods are all things with which teachers should familiarize themselves and use in their teaching.

Where We Came From:

Clairvoy (now Traditional Clairvoy) started out as a blog with five teachers giving advise to other teachers who submitted questions.  We still get messages from teachers all over the world. We’ve grown to a site with blogs, wikis, forums, articles and file sharing.  More than 1000 pages of different content and nearly 800 registered users.  We have a new site for teacher research called Education Study Group.  However, most of our visitors don’t sign in. People just read.

On commercial sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, less than 3% of users post content.  A much larger percentage (but much smaller number, of course) of our users contribute content.

For instance, as I write this 75 people are visiting Clairvoy (much the same as any time of day-even at 3am!). I can’t see who you are or what you’re doing (which drives me crazy) because most folks don’t login. Most just read.  But you all seem to be getting some benefit, and that’s great.

We’ve been focused from day one on the content, “Teachers Trading Strategy in Bite Sized Pieces” and that’s not changing.  But since we started (at a time when “what?” was the only response we ever got to a sentence containing the words ‘blog’ or ‘wiki’) we also functioned by default as a “sandbox” mashup of all the available technologies for teachers to learn how to use these new web2.0 thingamajigs.  Things have grown up around us.  With the right safety training, Wikispaces is great for teachers and students as are Google Sites, Blogger, and Wordpress.com.  You all know more today than you did just a few years ago.  Even Twitter is now a household word.

Where We Are Going:

We are staying focused on trading educational strategy, The “what we do” and “our values” pages will not change.  Our strategy is to better harness contributions of our users and create more meaningful and useful content. As a result, we have made some improvements to Clairvoy which will be steps toward the goal of better serving your needs:

One: The first step is an improvement to the search function with Advanced Clairvoy Search.  It’s up in the right hand corner.  It’s simply Google’s engine focused and targeting Clairvoy’s sites, blogs and features. (I’ve never said we’re creating a new wheel here folks.)  There’s an even more advanced targeted and detailed search available on the main menu under “Search.”

Two: The second step is a stronger editorial process on the wiki.  Everyone will still be able to contribute. This feature has been implemented.  The details of how that works are below.

Three: The third step is we have introduced an “Articles” feature for documents and reviews of scholarly articles. These differ from wiki pages in that they will not be changing.  It is a process for educators to provide peer reviewed information in longer format. As well as to collect reviews of scholarly papers which could help educators. This feature has been implemented.

Four: The forth step will be making the Clairvoy Blogs more robust.  We have recently employed the same technology used by Wordpress.com.  Over the coming months we will be adding all the features and functionality available.

The Editorial Process:

I wrote recently about the Writing Process and Open Collaborative Internet Tools.

MOZILLA, the folks behind Firefox browsers, use the same open source technology Clairvoy uses for their wiki: see http://support.mozilla.com.  Mozilla developed an easy to use editorial system which we are going to employ.  Any wiki page created or edited is not displayed to the public until it is looked over first.  The original page remains viewable until the updated version is approved and it is replaced.

If you login, you can see all the “sausage being made” with all the immediacy as always but with better labeling.  If you are not logged-in, you only see the finished product.  This simply will make a “drafting” area (for those logged-in) where contributions are welcome, but at the same time have the “published” knowledge base (for those not logged-in) that is extremely stable.  The difference being a day or two and, we hope, greater quality and better organized content.

We’re going to give it a try.  It means the pages you contribute to our wiki will be delayed for users not logged-in.

This new editorial process is just for wiki pages, not individual Clairvoy Blogs which have secondary logins for their owners to control more of the features within their own blogs.

Our values will not change and contributors who are unsure of the technology but have something to say will be helped through the process – not flamed.  That has been the case and will not change.

Contact Us:

The “Contact Us” function works now if you logged-in or not. We’ll try and be responsive to you (our readers and contributors) as we try to grow what we are doing to best serve you.  Let us know what  you think.

Graphic of Google forms for data collection

This is a way to use Google Docs and an iPhone or any hand-held device that can hit the web to track student data.

Remember in Educational Research, APA ethical guidelines require no information be used which could be employed to identify the student.

1)In Google docs, open a new Spreadsheet.

2)Name columns with the items you are tracking; Disrupting Teacher; Disrupting Students; Absence of Bad Behavior for 30 minutes, for example.  This will be determined by the student’s Behavior Intervention Plan or whatever research question you are tracking.  Each entry you make will automatically be stamped with the time and date, so you don’t have to worry about that column.

3)On the “Form” menu of the same spreadsheet click on “Create form.”  Name the form something you can remember, but not the name of the student.  Then on the Form menu choose “Go to live form” which opens your form as a webpage.  Along the bottom of that window is the “You can view the published form here: url” which is the web address of your live form.  Make a shortcut to the live form and put that on your iPhone or whatever you want to use to enter data.

From that point on, everything you enter into the live form and save, will be entered into your spreadsheet as a row and saved for your later analysis.

On the way out, remember to Save your form, and choose File and Save your spreadsheet.Too Easy!

For extra credit, on the forms creation page, you can edit the questions and make them multiple choice or check boxes to make data entry even easier!

There is always time to show our students we are life-long learners and they should be as well.  It is a fundamental part of running a constructionist classroom.

from a second grade teacher shared with her class.

from One Sentence by nobody@onesentence.org.

Bruce Springsteen

One doesn’t think of how odd sheet music is as a language.  Ubiquitous and rather separate from other languages.  Appealing no doubt to the musically inclined.

As Gardner (1999, p38) puts it, “Symbol systems may have been developed precisely because of their preexisting, ready fit with the relevant intelligence or intelligences.”

Gardner, Howard, (1999). Intelligence Reframed, NY: Basic Books.

Early adopters of blogs and wikis and other collaborative web technologies, have advocated a publish first, edit later model. Almost to the point at which some say, with a strong enough search engine, it doesn’t matter what goes in, as long as individuals can pinpoint and find what they need.

Having been in new media since 1982 (early adoption of news video in the field, cable before cable was cool, early commercial database with a web interface, early media asset management, first digital audio, first digital video, first streaming video and early into the blogs and wikis), I’m telling you Marshall McLuhan was right, but only in the short term.  Words and organization of content matter.  They always end up mattering, and define the things that last.

There is a nascent yet burgeoning trend on the web to use collaborative media to create things of refinement and value.  See Merlin Mann’s recent ontological crisis when Twitter showed him anyone could fill the web with snarky meaningless observations about popular culture.  Amazing, just weeks ago, he was thinking about changing his entire approach and going for higher, lasting, quality.  Also see Seth Godin’s view of his “members only & real names displayed” wiki which he finds increases quality.   Even he edited his wiki page on copyright to remove the “silly” content, and he was the one deeming it “silly.”

Web 2.0 doesn’t all have to be a Libertarian Paradise

Many point to Wikipedia as an example of a writing process-less implementation. However wikipedia demands accountability, has an article format and roving bands of independent editors wielding their “rational self interest.” Wikipedia is a lot more than just government-less. Creating a culture takes a template.

It is possible to use Web 2.0 and get all the goodness of open collaboration, and include all the goodness of the editorial process.  Granted, the “writing process” is no longer linear and can be designed to be much less hierarchical. But what history has taught us is an editorial process should be included in any successful publishing activity.

I’ve developed a circular model in which the first step is always publishing, but then the writer (or somebody) should go through all the steps.

It’s a long way from the hierarchical linear writing process of yesteryear. Those third grade teachers who teach their students “publishing” as a linear “secret” step-by-step process of private work with clandestine “writing conferences” before printing to the laser jet printer! are speaking to an audience of 9-year olds, many of whom published world-wide multiple times the previous evening and nobody (not the writing police or a roving editor) came knocking on their door.

An editorial process can take the good, bad and the ugly produced by the mob, and make it something the entire mob finds useful to consume.

Many early adopters of any technology become like helicopter parents, worried more about how structure will hem their children in rather than provide a pathway toward something more productive.

As a proponent of “open education” I would urge everyone looking for ways to make the collaborative web work, to not be too close minded about editorial openness.