:Connecting the Dots

One of the top 10 on Digg right now is an excellent interactive model of the human heart. It’s amazing how sophisticated these free simulation applets are becoming. A great tool for biology teachers. It could be used as part of a large-group demonstration or students can explore hands-on individually or in small groups. This is a great example of technology’s potential to allow students to observe objects and phenomena that have not traditionally been available to them in a science classroom.

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project just released a report on how American adults use the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. They tell us that 36% of adults use it. Perhaps the report’s most surprising finding is that Wikipedia users tend to be a well-educated group overall, with 50% having college degrees or better. The report also discusses the reasons behind Wikipedia’s popularity, and settles on two: its link structure results in high search rankings in Google (and hence it draws more search engine users to the site) and it is just plain convenient.

Interesting. Too bad they didn’t look at teens and children. I’d love to see how they stack up against the adults in terms of usage patterns and demographics. I’d also love to see some qualitative data (beyond my own experience) about how students use the site.  And how about some data on the people who contribute to and edit Wikipedia.  What do we know about them?

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The motto of Carmun is “students of the world unite!” This is not the kind of motto that is going to set teachers’ minds at ease as they click their way through the site. Too bad. The idea behind Carmun is a very noble one: offer students with similar academic interests a place to share ideas and sources.

Once you sign up for a free Carmun account, you can start or join groups focused on academic themes like Celtic Studies, Economics, and Feminism. Group members then have access to a threaded discussion forum where they can talk about the topic and where they share and manage a database of sources relating to it. Users can upload bibliographies of their projects, complete with ratings and reviews, for other members of the group to view. There is even a link to locate the work in your local library.

So basically, Carmun is a social networking site for study groups.  It’s MySpace for the late-night library set.  Its founder, Jonathan Edson, created the site when he found that life in graduate school was lonely compared to his experience in the corporate world, where “collaboration is necessary and expected.” Especially in the case of more esoteric topics, Carmun will give students the opportunity to connect with others who share their research interests and in the process, to unearth sources that they weren’t aware of before.

Yet in my mind I already hear the teachers complaining: “They need to do their own research! This is cheating! I want them to learn to do research in the library on their own! This is just like sharing term papers!” And perhaps there’s some validity to those concerns. At what point does collaboration become cheating? Especially in the primary and secondary grades, where the process of research is perhaps more important than the product, will a tool like Carmun become a crutch for the chronic procrastinator who has waited until the last minute and needs to circumvent the usual search routine - or worse, decides to use Carmun to pad a skimpy Works Cited page?

Does research have to be the lonely and isolating experience that it always has been in schools? Is that model still valid given the realities of our new, “flat” world? I don’t know. I like the idea behind Carmun but I’ve yet to mention it to the teachers in my district’s high school. “Students of the world unite!” may be a hard pill for them - and me - to swallow.

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A post over at Crucial Thought pointed out this neat site for creating simple comic strips. In my district, from time to time teachers complain that there is no PC software comparable to Comic Life on the Mac. This seemed like what we needed, so I decided to explore. What better way to spend a Sunday morning than making comic strips? Well, once I started playing with the first site, I decided to find out more (as so often happens on the internet) and eventually I spent some time with four different online comic strip generators. So I thought I’d share a little round-up of what I learned in a day of creating comics.

All of these tools present the user with an empty comic strip and allow him/her to drag and drop pre-drawn characters, scenery, props, and dialogue/thought balloons into the panels. There are then various options for outputting and/or sharing your work. All are easy to use and free.

Make Belief Comics Generator
Bill Zimmerman’s Make Belief Comics Generator creates the most “authentic” looking comics of the bunch, although it is still a little rough around the edges. It offers a pretty limited selection of 10 characters but for each character there are four separate “emotions” to choose from - an exclamation of surprise, a sly smile, a sad face, etc. None of the other generators offered as many (or in some cases, any) expressions and, as a result, with those you often wind up with the same character in an identical pose in each panel. The text in Make Belief’s dialogue balloons looks like handwriting and the whole thing is done in black and white, making it look like something right out of the daily funnies page. Disappointingly, the final result is rendered in Flash and cannot be downloaded as a JPEG or bitmap. You can either print it out or e-mail a link to one or more of your friends. Once this problem is solved (Zimmerman says he is working on it) and there are a few more characters and emotions to choose from, this will be a fantastic tool.

ToonDoo
ToonDoo bills itself as the “YouTube of comic strips.” It is web 2.0 to the core and, not surprisingly, my friends over at Zoho are involved somehow. This is the most polished of the four apps, with a fully-featured file management system with which you can open and save strips in progress and a beautiful and very intuitive interface. You can even publish and share your finished product on ToonDoo, a la YouTube. It includes a nice selection of characters and a number of backdrops and props, but relatively few “emotions” (see above) for each character. Perhaps its coolest feature is the ability to upload your own graphics, something none of the other tools included. It is also the only one of the four that produces its strips in color. On odd thing: I could find no way to delete a strip once I had created and saved it.

Read-Write-Think Comic Creator
Read-Write-Think Comic Creator is a very simple tool sponsored by the NCTE and aimed squarely at kids. Unlike the other three, you only see one panel at a time, a weakness. Everything is black and white and there is a pretty limited selection of characters. Annoyingly, there is no way to flip the horizontal orientation of the character graphics, so everyone seems to be looking off to one side of the cartoon, instead of looking at one another as they talk. Also, all of the characters are waving for some reason. The characters and backdrops are simple line drawings. I might apologize for this site’s lack of features by saying that its simplicity makes it easy for young students to use, but frankly, all of these sites are straightforward enough for a second-grader to figure out in ten minutes or so.

StripGenerator
StripGenerator offers an interesting spin on the comic generator concept: you sign up for an account and then blog by creating comic strips. An interesting concept but this site suffers from really poor character graphics. The people/animals are too small and crudely drawn using geometric shapes and there are no backgrounds: everyone just appears to be floating in space. Too bad - the blog/comic strip concept is a great idea. Let’s hope these guys find an art department soon…

While ToonDoo is really well-made, I think MakeBelief is the site to watch here. It’s the only one of the four where I made a comic strip I was really proud of - of course, I was disappointed that I had no way to download it when I was done. But apparently they’re working on that…

And what would a teacher and her students do with a comic strip generator? Dozens of things: explain the dynamics of a story (beginning-middle-end/conflict-rising action-resolution), create conversations in a foreign language, make political cartoons, offer unfinished comic strips as a “do-now” activity, etc., etc. Be creative!

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The tremendous comment thread on the next generation of teachers at Weblogg-ed got me to thinking about the value of experience in integrating technology in the classroom. I said it there and I’ll say again it here: more and more, I identify the most tech-savvy teachers by the technologies they reject and the reasons they offer as to why.

I don’t believe the skepticism and creativity are mutually exclusive. The best artists are oftentimes the harshest critics, especially when it comes to their own work. I see many teachers who use technology for the wrong reasons: the desire to “jump on the bandwagon” or lust for a shiny new toy. They fall in love with the tool and then invent instructional problems to “solve” with it. They go to a conference like NECC and are overwhelmed. They come home and say, “I have to start doing this” without knowing why.

The best teachers are the ones who tuck those experiences away in a journal, a filing cabinet, a corner of their very active brain. And they wait. They keep teaching, always looking for a better way to get through to their students. Every so often, a challenge or opportunity arises in the classroom and they go back to that toolbox- wherever it may be - and find appropriate solutions. To me, that’s a real master teacher: someone who is aware of the many ways to get through to kids, can understand their needs and deploy appropriate strategies to meet them.

Don’t get me wrong: good teachers are always learning about technology as well as many other things: their content area(s), assessment strategies, pedagogy, etc. The best, through years of experience in the classroom, develop that precious balance of creativity and skepticism. They say “no” a lot, but when they say “yes,” they embrace that “yes” and run with it… and the results are frequently stunning.

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