Reflections on fall quarter blogging...

Hmmm.  I enjoyed blogging this quarter.  As we talk about in literacy, it seems more purposeful now, and so more worthwhile. I blog to help me organize my thoughts. I blog because I've seen something cool and I want to remember it. I blog sometimes in order to try to get other's perspective on a question.  Overall, even without an audience, I have found the blogging helpful.

I have about 10 drafts of blogs yet unpublished.  I've stopped thinking about the weekly deadline for class blogs, and instead I publish things as I feel I'm finished processing the event or idea that inspired them, and am ready to share that with the world.  I like this  evolution too.  It feels more genuine to post according to my own internal measure.

At one point I thought i would include a question in each post, in order to elicit feedback.  I found that when I planned in advance to do this, it changed how I wrote the post (once again, echoes of ideas about purpose and audience from literacy class).  I didn't do that consistently though, because not everything lent itself to leaving a question on the table.  I find when reading others posts, I usually agree, but don't have much to add on.  I know too that brevity has become valued as we try to keep up with each other's blogging.  At this point, my blogging is a mix, some short, some long, some with open questions, some more reflective.  

There aren't a lot of comments on my blog.  If I am making 2 comments a week on others blogs, I am not receiving that same number back.  Maybe because of the nature of my blogs, but perhaps also because we are not all managing 2 comments a week.  I know I go in bursts with respect to commenting.   As I've suggested, I find my current style of blogging helpful and useful to me, and while I would be happy to see more feedback, that is not a driving force for me at this point.

My blog from this quarter which I think would be conducive to further conversation and ideas: 

Math foldables 

Fun in Math 

A couple blog posts where I found the discussion interesting:

Flipped classrooms 

Flipped classroom followup 

Translation through the iPad Viewer

One of the coolest apps I’ve seen for the iPad is WordLens, which will translate whatever text it sees through the camera viewer.  I didn’t demo it in class because each translation dictionary costs $5.  I bought the English/Spanish dictionary, but since I don’t speak Spanish, I can’t tell how well it is translating.  Nevertheless, here is a picture of the front page of today’s New York Times, and also one of how WordLens translated it (in real time, directly to the screen), when I hovered the iPad over it.

Museum of the Moving Image

We visited my parents in NYC this weekend, and while we were there we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.  Too bad it's too far for a field trip, because it had a lot of of kid-friendly activities.

In one spot they had still cameras mounted overhead which were pointed down at a flat desk with a marked frame.  On the desk there were cut-outs of characters and props as well as backgrounds to use to make a stop action video. One could position the cut-outs, and then press a button to take a picture.  Once you had a sequence of photos, you could watch your video play back on a screen.

Similarly, in another room, they supplied black paper and scissors so you could make a silhouette stop action animation.  There they used cameras and laptops running iStopAnimation to make the videos.

Zoey is my brother's dog.

Another fun part of the exhibit was the Translation Party.  If you texted a sentence to the given phone number, it would be projected on a wall, then electronically translated to Japanese and projected onto the wall again. Then the Japanese was translated back to English, and then back to Japanese, with each translation projected.  The Translation Party stopped when 2 consecutive English and Japanese translations stayed the same.  Those final versions made no sense.  Maybe digital translation has a ways to go...

Too small to see?

A calendar!!!

Still looking into how to have this shared by the group.  The share setting changes to "see free/busy time only" every time I try to share it...

Dragon Dictate and Grade Data Entry...

Years ago, I helped a woman with MS figure out and customize Dragon Dictate so that she could control her computer by voice alone.  Her voice was erratic to be sure, and Dragon Dictate was amazing for its ability to learn her voice, and reliably understand it.  I know that there is a Dragon Dictate app for the iPad, but it also comes built in with Windows, and can be started from control panel (as "Start Speech Recognition").

I helped grade 100s of 8th grade science and math tests this week, and entered the grades in the spreadsheet, which is truly a tedious business.  I wonder if it would be less tedious if you could just position the cursor at the start of 2 column table and speak the grades: "Ella tab numeral 3 tab Joe tab numeral 3.5 tab Armando numeral 2.75" etc.  Then you could take the resulting table, sort it by name  and paste it into whatever spreadsheet you use to keep your grades.  I tried this with Word with no trouble.

The beauty of dictating is that you can train the computer to recognize your voice very reliably  saying the names of your students.  I imagine the difficulty is if your class roster doesn't exactly line up - say you have a new student, or another who is absent.  I need to think on this a while longer.

My kindle...

I have had a Kindle for about 2 years now, and I love it.  I love that I can get any book any time (and for free if it's in the library collection). I love that it's portable. I love that I can adjust the font size. I love that (with a cover with a light) I can read no matter how much light there is.

Since I have had it, I read more, and I read a wider spectrum of material, but I also read more shallowly.  I never flip back to clarify a section that didn't really make sense.  When there's a character who has been introduced before, but I can't recall the details, I never go back.  When I get bored, I don't skip ahead, or flip to reassure myself that it will get better:  I just stop reading.  For me, reading on the kindle is only ever in page order.  While I know I can search and set bookmarks and highlights, I never want to leave the reading in order to do those things.  In print books, I flip back and ahead all the time, without finding an interruption.  I have spent enough hours with my kindle so that my patterns are set. Not to say that I couldn't change them if I really wanted, but if I haven't had the drive to use the extra tools yet, I doubt that I will in the future.

So I still want to read books that I think I will love in print.  I buy print versions of the books for class so that I can flip through them.  (I tried to write my paper on "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" from an ebook, and I wanted to pull my hair out.)

Based my experience,  I would think ebooks are a great way to make sure every student always has something to read at hand which they enjoy.  But I think that they should also sometimes use print books for the richer experience of being able to easily flip forwards and backwards.  It will be interesting to see how the use of ebooks progresses as ereaders become more and more common.