But teach I need my cellphone to read the President's speech.

President Obama will stream his speech in Cairo on whitehouse.gov as well as text, tweet and post it to online social network sites. In my school we had trouble finding enough places to show the Inauguration, if students could use cellphones, Twitter and social networking sites in schools everyone would be able to follow the speech as well as compare the different platforms. People can participate in a a live web chat via a State Department website. The administration is hoping to amplify the speech by offering it on multiple platforms and translating it into numerous languages. By texting the speech President Obama will reach parts of the world that use cellphones as their primary source for information.

Symphonies Use Texting to Draw Younger Crowds

Image: Joi via Flickr

The NY Times ran a story describing how symphonies around the country are letting audiences text to choose encores. The symphonies are hoping that a more interactive show will draw younger crowds.

If a 16th century art form can adapt to the times I am sure a 20th century model of schools can change as well.

The best use of cellphones I have read about recently is a History teacher who lets students keep their cellphones on their desk, when a question comes up that no one knows the answer to he lets them text Cha Cha which is a texting search engine for the answer.

Have Google Grade Your Papers

One of the most valuable but under used Google Apps has to be the Forms feature of Google Spreadsheets. I have started giving my students quizzes using Forms. Forms is a tool that lets you create survey questions with multiply choice, short answer or long answer responses. Using the above IF STATEMENT a teacher can program the Google Form to grade itself. I then filter the grades into my gradebook spreadsheet. The above statement checks if the student's answer matches the correct answer of -21 in cell M1. If the answer is correct the student gets 100, if the answer is incorrect the student gets a 0.

Students Communicate Across Languages

Technology has enabled us to easily translate from language to language. A 21st century skill we try to teach our students is global citizenship. Language translation software and social network technology have combined to bring us Meedan. Meedan will let students in America speak with students in the Mideast on current events. How valuable could it be for a student in the United States to talk to a student in Iraq about the current war? Could this communication improve relationships between us?

Teach Social Studies Create a Better Citizen

Technology has increased the transparency of government. Students can now follow politicians from campaign donation to bill signing.

MetaVid is a video search for Congress. Using closed captions students can search House and Senate speeches by keyword, bill number, politician, etc. You don't have to sit through hours of video, MetaVid cues the video to the part you are searching for.

http://metavid.org/wiki/

Open Congress gives students a one stop shop to study Congress. All information is available on House members - committees, bills introduced, voting record, campaign donations, even who they vote most often with or against. Open Congress aggregates new and blogs onto its website as well as offers widgets to compare members or follow bills right on your own website.

http://www.opencongress.org/

I can't leave out OpenSecrets.org which makes it very easy to follow the money each politician is given.


We need to teach students how to better use technology to become better citizens.

Visualize Data

Students have access to almost unlimited data on the internet. Two websites can help students make sense of this data beyond Microsoft Excel. Putting these visuals up on a SmartBoard can lead to discussions making sense of the data and discovering patterns. The above bubble graph represents the most spoken languages around the world.

Many Eyes from IBM gives users a variety of options to display data beyond the standard line graph or pie chart.

http://www.many-eyes.com/

World Mapper takes maps of the world and distorts country sizes to represent data being analyzed. For example a world map studying countries where people live on less than $2 a day would make a country like China or India a lot larger than the US.

http://www.worldmapper.org/index.html

Collaborate with a Rock Star

Attention Music Teachers!

Students can collaborate with Rivers Cuomo, frontman for the rock band Weezer on his latest songs. Rivers has a You Tube channel where he posts videos with specific instructions for collaborating with him.

Use Wordle to Study Inauguration Addresses

Using Wordle students can create word clouds to compare inaugural addresses. The more prominent the word is in a speech the larger it appears in the cloud. Above is a screen shot of JFK's address. It will be interesting to compare Barack Obama's to it.

Online University at the Forefront of Education?

It seems fitting that an online university points out the 21st Century deficiency of our current educational system.

Video Games in Science

NPR did a story on the video game Crayon Physics Deluxe. While the game appears simple at the start you quickly realize the power behind it. You create crayon drawings that behave according to the laws of physics. The potential here is huge in a physics or science class. See the video demonstration below.



Here are some free web based games that use physics in the same way Crayon Physics Deluxe does.
Miniclip has a game called Magic Pen which is a simple version of Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Fantastic Contraption acts as a physics emulator.
Line Rider looks like you are drawing on a sketchpad with a pencil. Physics are applied and a cult following is on You Tube sharing game clips.

These games led me to some other video games that might be useful in science.
While Crayon Physics is only for PC currently Phun Physics is available for both PC and Mac. The big difference between Phun Physics and Crayon Physics is Phun is a "sandbox" where you have a blank canvass to experiment. Crayon makes you complete the levels to use the "sandbox" feature.



Little Big Planet is for Playstation 3, you are a sock trying get through levels of the giant planet around you. This game is more collaborative than the physics games above. Multiple players need to help each other complete the levels. The laws of physics apply to the world you are in as well as the interactions of the teammates. The game has both a game mode and "sandbox" mode. Any level you create in the "sandbox" mode can be shared.



In this video the developers talk about the features within the game.



Crazy Machines is similar to Incredible Machines it gives the student (scientist) an objective and supplies which are used to create a solution.



Crayon Physics will become an App on the iPhone but until that happens check out the Trace App on the iPhone, Physics in your pocket.

Video Games providing 21st Century Skills?
Problem-solving
Communication
Higher-order thinking
Creativity
Collaboration

The above games deal with physics but if you are teaching oceanography you need to check out Endless Ocean for Wii. You scuba dive through the ocean finding and archiving different types of fish.

An Academic View of You Tube

Lately I have caught myself relying very heavily on videos for information. If I go to a new website and want to figure out what it is all about I don't go to the About section but look for a video that previews the website. The same happens when I look up how to do something. I used to go to howsuffworks.com for written tutorials but now I just search You Tube for a video tutorial. It is amazing how You Tube is influencing our behavior. Michael Wesch is a Professor at Kansas State University. He presented "An Anthropological Introduction to You Tube" at the Library of Congress. The video looks at the phenomenon of You Tube and its videos while becoming a phenomenon itself. The video explains that we are becoming more isolated while at the same time forming communities. A value system has developed within You Tube with views acting as a currency. Hint at any "fakeness" in your video and risk losing all currency. Next time you are at the office or a party and someone starts passing around a laptop to show a You Tube video think how this one site has become a social glue.

There is a talent in developing a good You Tube Video. The best videos have a narrative. Search 30 Second Movies on You Tube and you will find 2 hour movies shrunk down to 30 seconds with an intact narrative. This narrative voice is changing in the digital age but why not use it to teach in English classes. Have a Refilm Contest where students recreate their favorite movie in no longer than five minutes.

Collaborating on Searches

With the rise of web 2.0 and social networks this year I predict 2009 will be the year where collaboration of searching online really takes off.

ReFrame It is a browser plugin that lets users highlight text on websites and add notes in the sidebar. The highlights and notes can then be shared with friends.

Search Together from Microsoft is a plugin for Internet Explorer that lets users share websites with notes. It seems very similar to AIM. There doesn't seem to be any feature where users can highlight specific text on each individual website.

Google's Search Wiki lets users promote or remove search results. Users can also apply notes to search results and add any websites Google may have missed. You can even see other people's results for the same search. I think the Search Wiki has the potential to become a lot more collaborative in the future.

Some Quotes to Start Off the New Year

Use the following quote when talking about the use collaboration tools.

"None of us is as smart as all of us."
-Japanese proverb

Trying to encourage forward looking technology pioneering teachers on your staff.

"Be the change you want to see."
-Mahatma Gandhi

"Not teaching your students how to properly search the internet is worse than taking them into the New York Public Library circa 1988 to do a report when the librarian is off duty and they don't know the first thing about the Dewey Decimal System."
-Christopher Polizzi

Taking Video or Photos of Yourself Voting is Illegal

in some states. This is not to prevent documentation of who you vote for but rather to stop the selling of your vote.

After the 2000 Election debacle, Web 2.0 has come to the rescue. The NY Times has reported on wikis that have been set up to monitor voting.

Voter Suppression Wiki

SourceWatch’s Election Protection Wiki

Video the Vote project

You Tube Video Your Vote

Would we have elected George W. Bush if we had wikis collaborating to monitor the voting in the 2000 election?

Hold a Mock Election in Your School

Using Google Forms our school set up an online ballot where voter demographic information and rationale for voting for a particular candidate can be collected. Math classes can do a statistical analysis of voter information while social studies classes can analyze the reasons voters give for voting for their candidate. The Google Form collects the data in a Google Spreadsheet that can be shared among teachers. See of Google Form ballot here.

Web 2.0 and the Election

McCain is encouraging posts on blogs of every political angle. Posters are encouraged to email the campaign with their work.



Obama lets people embed code to place his tax savings calculator on their websites.

Election '08

Help your students follow the election through the NBC News iCue website. The site is a treasure trove of present and past videos.

It is however 2008 and the web is changing presidential politics. Go over to TechPresident.com to see how the candidates are using the web and how the web is using them.

With the debate season upon us you have to watch the debates through C-Span's Debate Hub, C-Span has taken the tradition of presidential debates and layered web 2.0 applications over it.

Help Students Visualize Large Amounts of Data

The people at www.many-eyes.com are helping us visualize our uploaded data. You are no longer limited to Excel's Chart Wizard. The website offers different views data. The charts can help students see patterns and make comparisons. Data can be differentiated for students. Students can manipulate data, seeing in real time how this changes data patterns. Here is a visual of the AIG bailout and government bailouts overall.

Create online formative assessments and tests, for FREE

If you have a Google account you can use Google Forms which is part of the Google Docs suite to create surveys (tests) for your students. The assessments can be multiple choice or open ended. The results are funneled into a Google spreadsheet making grading extremely easy, no more luging home piles of tests, you just sign into your account to view the results of sortable data. The surveys create a website or can be embedded. Use the survey as a formative assessment to create groupings, homework assignments, or to test at the end of a unit.

Wordle Word Splashes

I have blogged about wordle.net in the past. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Wordle is great for creating word splashes on the smartboard. Wired magazine took McCain and Obama's convention speeches and feed them into Wordle, this is what came out.