Mike W’s Blog

I’m thrilled with Google Calendar. It has really helped us coordinate schedules here at work, and at home, we no longer have to exchange email lists of events, which we previously had to then manually copy to our respective individual calendars. It’s saving a lot of time. Although Google Calendar doesn’t yet have tasks, there’s a cool web app that does - Remember the Milk.

It allows for prioritization of tasks, reminders, and integrates very nicely with Google Calendar. Once you add the Remember the Milk Calendar, you’ll see the following on your Google Cal which links to your tasks. These can be edited inline via Google Cal.

Among other nice features, if you tag your tasks to represent the nature of the to-do item, a tag cloud can be displayed which takes into account priority and due date. So the bigger the tag appears in the cloud, the more likely it is that the task is on your radar to get done.

I’m beginning to feel more and more that there’s a strong spiritual element to time management. The better I prioritize my work and home tasks, the more attention I seem to give to the right things. I really like Covey’s examples using different size rocks to represent important and not-so-important tasks.

My goal is to make sure I have enough tasks on my list that I can tag as spiritual (time for reading the Bible and other inspirational material, doing something nice for someone just because, or adding issues to prayer). Maybe a shrinking spiritual tag will be a flag to focus on prioritization. Remember the Milk is set up so that tasks are private (unless published), so I’m the only one who can see the tags and the cloud.

It’s worth experimenting with, anyway. If technology can help me be more purposeful with my to do list, then I’m all for it.

It took me a while to get used to the interface (lots of AJAX), but by using keyboard shortcuts (like ‘t’ for new task and ‘d’ for assigning due dates), I was able to quickly add tasks and prioritize them.

Yesterday I taught a FULIR (Furman University Learning In Retirement) class on blogging as part of Dr. Lipscomb’s What’s New in Technology Series. I’m really enjoying the opportunity to get back in the classroom, and this was a great group of folks – friendly and very curious, especially with regards to how this technology fit into the big picture. The initial discussion was fostered with some iClicker questions about experience with blogs and familiarity with the term ‘Web2.0’. After a quick overview, we jumped into creating our own blogs.

The time I spent on Friday creating WordPress accounts (wordpress.com) for each participant was worth it. We quickly started creating posts, and I think everyone enjoyed swapping out themes.

Sample WordPress Theme

I’d like to see WordPress simplify adding pictures to a post. What if by inserting a photo into a post, it was uploaded behind the scenes, instead of having to upload, send to editor, etc..? We got through it, but the challenges highlighted the counter-intuitive user interface.

I think a decent portion of the class may keep blogging, based on the questions I was getting after class. Several wanted to know more about feedreaders, so they could consolidate the blogs they have been following.

A couple of things to do differently next time:

1. Track down some mice for the laptops. The trackpad was a significant barrier at times.

2. Provide more detailed, step-by-step instructions for adding / editing a post, and especially adding an image.

A couple of things to keep:

1. The clickers. This helped get a quick, anonymous gauge of experience level.

2. Directions on how to get to the admin panel. Many of the themes either make this link hard to find or remove it altogether, so having this in the handout really helped.

I really enjoyed this and might propose some classes for the spring!

One person commented as they left that they would explore this more the next time they couldn’t sleep. My blog started one morning when I was tossing and turning. I wonder how many blogs have started during a bout of insomnia??

On Friday I presented at a meeting of the Upstate Schools Consortium which met at Furman University. I got to meet with a great group of talented and enthusiastic K-12 educators from across the upstate. It was a lot of fun!

I talked about our recent and early investigation into clicker technology. We’re piloting these in a handful of classrooms to determine if they’re a good fit and developing best practices. I’ve reviewed a good bit of the research, and it seems like clickers are most effective when they are used to support a constructivist learning environment which makes good sense. A great bibliography of the research is available from Vanderbilt University. If the technology is only going to be used to deliver fairly low-level content questions and not going to be used to modify instruction or engage the student, then I’m guessing we’ll find it’s not worth the investment. I’ve used them in several sessions and feel my initial skepticism waning.

Here’s a link to the question report that was generated from our discussion. Just click on the session summary to see the responses. Each session is actually split in two, so session 1 and 2 are the interaction with the first group and so on. For some reason, the second half of the session with the last group wasn’t recorded.

I split the sessions because there seems to be a bug in iClicker (at least on my machine) where if you add to an existing session, rather than starting a new one, the screen capture breaks.

* The question about Saddam Hussein was to start a very mini discussion about potential advantages of the anonymity that the clickers provide. I wish we had more time to discuss.

* The question about the gorilla required some intro explanation not on the slide. I described the Harvard study in which folks were asked to count the number of basketball passes between two individuals. During the video a woman with an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the scene. 54% of participants reported never seeing the gorilla, so I asked if this intense focus would be a plus or minus in a life or death survival situation. In sessions where there was time, they discussed and recast their votes (Mazur-type of model with clickers).

* The Google Earth Question revolved around the spread of avian flu and asked participants to predict where the early outbreaks occurred (answer C: Southern Asia). The circled regions aren’t visible in the iClicker report, but were visible to participants.

* Oh yeah, the answer to the state insect question is A (Carolina Mantid). This was pretty obscure, but most folks knew it! I sure didn’t. I was hoping to demonstrate that simple content questions weren’t as fun or interactive as the gorilla / discussion type, but this generated a good bit of buzz as well (pun intended ).

I’ll be updating the blog with our iClicker pilot experience. Here’s a link to the session handout. Please comment with your clicker experiences and thoughts in the comments here. We didn’t have enough time to talk, so it would be fun to continue the discussion here.

As I mentioned in a previous post we’ve just begun to explore the use student-generated wikis to help students construct chemistry knowledge, making use of ChemDraw to generate chemical structures. After an initial introduction today, ChemDraw seems to be a great way to create very nice chemical structures for a final page. However, it’s definitely not as quick as drawing the structure on the back of a napkin, so the extra time involved in creating the structure could limit a good wiki collaboration. I read that the open source course management system, Moodle, is looking to integrate a collaborative whiteboard currently available through Jabber / Coccinella. I tried it out and it’s pretty simple. Since Moodle has a Wiki module and will soon have an interactive whiteboard via Coccinella, we could do what we need with Moodle and ChemDraw. While the wiki page is undergoing development, the students could “hand draw” the chemical structures and then use ChemDraw for the more formal, final presentation.

One of the output formats of Coccinella is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) but not jpeg. Although the new Mozilla browser supports SVG display, I didn’t want to bank on the fact that everyone’s browser would support SVG. I found a nice SVG converter online, so I was able to convert the molecule above to a jpeg from home, without photoshop.

GE has a collaborative online whiteboard as well that looks potentially useful. The sketching session can be saved, so that you can see the progression of the diagram as well as the final product.

I’m experimenting with Google Docs and noticed there’s a feature to publish the collaborative Google document directly to a blog. I’m going to give it shot, so if you see this, it worked! This may help me get around the fact that I haven’t had much success getting a spell checker installed in WordPress. This seems to be a really nice way to collaborate, as opposed to emailing a document back and forth with tracking turned on. Nice! You can save as a pdf, open office document, and more. The only problem is that the title didn’t transfer. I added that manually. Other than that… very smooth.

This looks really interesting - 10 case studies of wikis in education. The first chapter is free, but to get the rest of the book and to contribute to the final chapter requires a payment of $19.99. The book was created via Wiki technology. The chapter on “Constructing Science Knowledge Using a Wiki” looks especially interesting, in light of a recent talk with Brian and Greg. Stewart Mader’s website Using Wiki in Education also has some good examples and links.