Feed Your Inner Nerd

Have you been known to sit and read the encyclopedia just for the fun of it? Would you even THINK of going to the bathroom without a book in your hand?

I just ran across In Our Time, a great series from BBC radio exploring science, philosophy and culture. Each program focuses on a different topic--representations of Hell through the ages, or frothy brain-teasers such as "Does Time Exist?" with discussion by a panel of experts.


I spent a good portion of the morning sampling various bits and pieces--it's definitely time to haul out the iPod and load these. They'll be great to listen to while driving to work. Or as discussion starters in class.

A Word a Day

Need to prep for those SAT words? Are you a visual or aural learner? WordAhead provides over 500 vocabulary videos that describe the word and definition, after which an amusing cartoon and story uses the word (and several others!) in context.

I'll Believe It When I See It....

Busy, busy spring, so my posting has definitely tapered off. However, a post by Chris Harris on the AASL Blog raises again that old spectre: Are books obsolete?

Here we go again.

Apparently, the Dean of Purdue/Indiana University library nonchalantly stated that there will be no books left in his library within three years, thanks to databases and the University's digitization program. So Chris posits the end of books for research purposes (we'll still use them for pleasure reading, Kindle to the contrary), and that we better start training our high school students to cope.

Do you sense me rolling my eyes here?

I admire Chris greatly, read his SLJ blog regularly, but he's jumping the gun here. While Purdue's library may well divest itself of physical books (see my title) within three years, I doubt most universities--and almost no secondary schools--are even near that point. The high cost of digitizing books is prohibitive, in and of itself.

Nor is Google Books the cure-all, unless there are major changes in copyright laws. Try accessing any book to which your school hasn't purchased rights, and you'll get only part of the book, and usually not the part you need. Many books aren't even searchable.

This also fails to take into account user preferences. Students are supposed to be digital natives, but the first thing my students want to do when they find something online is print it out. Ever try doing that with a Google Book? I'd be interested to hear the uproar from campus faculty this might have caused. The Dean of the library may be ready to go virtual, but are his faculty and students?

We ran a trial of Questia --a wonderful digital library--last year as a way to augment our book collection; the kids hated it. They found it difficult to search the books, couldn't print out more than a single page and generally told me "don't waste your money; we won't use it."

While I'm fairly sure we're all going to be reading everything in the cloud some day,we could quote Twain here: "The rumos of my [imminent] death have been greatly exaggerated."

Thus, until such time as the resource world is far more digitally friendly than it is, I will continue to teach students to use a wide variety of material, whatever may happen at Purdue!

Animoto Book Trailers

I worked on a project with the 7th graders a couple weeks ago. We used Garage Band and Animoto to create book trailers for the novels they chose for an independent reading assignment.

They searched for photos in Flickr Creative Commons, used music from Royalty Free Music and Free Play Music, used Power Point to create Works Cited slides and saved them as JPEGs. I did let them find their book and author images from a Google images search, figuring if they're not public domain, they should be! I'm not sure that's an argument that would actually hold up in court, of course....

There is an issue with Animoto cutting off the end narration and the final (Works Cites) slides, but I'm trying to figure out a work around for that. I think if you allow the soundtrack an extra 15 seconds or so of music beyond the narration, that will force Animoto to use those final slides. That's my theory, anyway!
Here's a sample of the result.

EtherPad Does Google Docs One Better

A new Web 2.0 tool launched in November: Etherpad. If you've ever been frustrated trying to use Google Docs--inviting all the students, wait time to see changes, not knowing who added what--Etherpad may be for you. It's in beta test right now, and it's been so popular, they've had to go into closed Beta mode. But there's a link to email and ask for an account, and it only takes them a day or two to respond.



Etherpad creates an online collaborative document with real time updating as people add information. Our middle school history teacher is using it currently to teach his students note-taking skills. Better yet, as each student signs in (they only need a URL, not an account), they are assigned a different color, so you automatically know who is writing what.

It allows you to save different versions of the project, creating a unique URL for each one.

Right now, it only supports plain text, but RTF is a possibility in the future.

Support the Arts

I don't know if it's our Puritan roots or pioneer "I'm too busy trying to live to read a book" ethos or what, but America has never been great about supporting the arts. I can't tell you the...discussions...my parents and I had when I decided to switch my major from Marine Biology to English!

Just yesterday, Thomas Friedman recommended doubling the salary of teachers...but only those in math and science. What, elementary teachers, English teachers, history teachers, music teachers don't teach useful skills? He will receive, and deserves, gigabytes worth of protesting emails on that one.

Other countries have had Ministers of Arts or Culture for centuries, and it's high time the U.S. supported a similar position. Quincy Jones plans to ask President Obama to create a Secretary of the Arts, and here's an online petition you can sign in support of that.

Book Reports 2.0--And Royalty Free Music

Remember those boring book reports we all had to give (and listen to!) back in the day??

Well, give them a spiffy new look with Animoto. I'm helping the 7th graders do their annual book reports today, so I spent last night doing this demo explaining the assignment (and giving them a sense of what Animoto can do.)

I used Garage Band to record the narration and sound track (Audacity would work for Windows people), saved it as an MP3, then uploaded it into Audacity. I made the slides with Power Point (saved as jpegs), uploaded some creative commons photos (that I should have cited, but didn't. Bad modeling!) and voila!

It did take about 8 "re-mixes" to finally get the soundtrack and images to sync-up reasonably well. Take a look at the result.


For some reason, the Works Cited slide at the end isn't showing up...

Here's the pathfinder I put together for the project. I should also add that Royalty Free Music is now offering educator grants that allow free access to their archives for school use.