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.

Digital Literacy

"Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?"

The NY Times story talks about the future of reading and digital vs print reading. Some notable quotes from the piece.

"Even accomplished readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online."

"Reading in print and on the internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author's vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."

"Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five websites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book."


A digital literacy encompasses more than print literacy. If a student reads on a fourth grade level in print they will probably read on a fourth grade level digitally. However, if a student possesses the right online skills they may be able to lift there fourth grade digital reading level. Can they properly look up a word they don't understand in a reading? Can they research a reference they may not understand or go further in depth on a topic they interested in?

We need to teach our students how to use the internet.

90% of the students who read this website containing information on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus thought it was really endangered.

Adults are NO BETTER "An Online Hoax Becomes a Source About a Suspect"
Reuters were one of the major newspapers to quote a hoax website when Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb leader was picked up for war crimes.

We need to teach how to source a website to find out who owns it (www.easywhois.com).

You should also know who links to your website (use altavista's link command).

Most recently someone was caught "scrubbing" McCain's VP pick Governor Palin's Wikipedia page. We don't like to think that any major news organizations sourced Wikipedia, but if they had you would hope they noticed some favorable changes to the site less than 24 hours before her pick was announced.

Make Your Students Part of History

An Art and Social Studies teacher can work together to have students photoshop themselves into photographs from history they are currently studying. Students will get excited putting themselves in the middle of history, they can present the doctored photos, explaining to their classmates what is occurring at that time and place.

"I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop."