Dis Lit & Tech Blog

Dave's Podcast

2008-11-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

Gabcast! RE 5532 #2

Here's an attempt to embed a Gabcast Flash Player

2008-11-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

Gabcast! RE 5532 #2

Gabcast

2008-11-17T11:31:00.001-05:00

Here's a link.

On Multiple Perspectives

2008-02-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

I often have my undergraduate students problem-solve by working together to propose multiple solutions to any given problem (e.g., how can you teach a child to understand Concept of a Word, digraphs, letter-sound relationships, and so on). My underlying belief is that any given problem has a potentially unlimited number of solutions bound only by time, will, creativity, externally imposed constraints, and other resources.

My goals are to build collaborative problem-solving skills in my students, help them understand that most problems have many solutions, and that they have some control over many of the problems they will face as teachers. This is particularly important today when the federal government is telling schools that only solutions that have been derived by particular methods are valid means of teaching (see, e.g., NCLB, the National Reading Panel Report, RTI, and the like).

The following poem is what got me started thinking about the importance of multiple perspectives in our current Age of Unreason:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

I have intentionally never read what others, especially critics, think these verses mean. I prefer to continue puzzling over the meanings, reflecting on how the verses play out at different times in my life.

Voice Thread Trial

2007-09-19T20:05:00.000-04:00

Here is my first attempt at a public Voice Thread, using pictures from a literacy camp in Minnesota. Here's the VoiceThread:

You can link to an easier to see and use version here: http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=7331.
You should be able to add your own comments, either typed or verbal. Give it a try.

Making PowerPoint Books

2007-09-19T11:11:00.001-04:00

Here's a relatively easy way to make books in PowerPoint. You might want to make books because one or more of your students has a specific interest not met by your classroom or school library, has a disability and paper copies are inaccessible, you enjoy making books. You might want to teach your kids how to make them for each other. I've tried to lay out steps below. This is how I do it on a Mac. Some things will look slightly different on a PC but the process is the same.

1. Open PowerPoint. Go to Format > Slide Layout and Choose Title.

2. Move the Title box to the bottom of the slide (unless you like your text at the top). Copy and paste this slide repeatedly so that you have more slides than you think you'll use. It's faster and easier to delete unwanted slides when you're done than to create additional.

3. Gather your images for the pages from Flickr's creative common area. These are public domain photos that are searchable. You can write your text first and then search for images second, but it is faster to get your pictures and then write text to fit.

4. Click on the All Sizes button above the picture, choose the small or medium size for digital books. Small usually looks fine--you can view in PowerPoint and decide for yourself.

5. On a Mac you can click and drag the picture directly onto a PowerPoint slide, move it where you want, and resize. Then your can drag the URL to the notes window below the slide. On a PC, download the image (use the Insert Picture > From File to put on slide), and copy and paste the URL.

6. Save regularly. Computers, especially lab computers, are fickle. You don't want to have to repeat your work.

7. In slide sorter view, you can rearrange your images/slides to suit your needs.

8. When you are done, you can transfer the URL's from the notes under each slide to a final "credits" page.

If you have additional questions, let me know, and I'll do my best to clarify these instructions further.

Accessible Video Game -- Snood

2007-09-19T09:36:00.000-04:00

If you haven't caught the Snood wave, you will soon. Originally designed as shareware by a college geology professor, David Dobson, it is now distributed by Word of Mouse Games. There are multiple PC and Mac versions, a version for GameBoy, Palm... Seriously addictive.

Heard a radio interview with the inventor, who mentioned the game was played on one of the Sopranos episodes, that Michael Crichton claimed it was cutting into his writing time... Brandeis University has a Snood club listed in its student organizations.

Simple concept--shoot Snoods--funny looking critters. Since it requires only mouse access, and there are gazillions of mouse adaptations, and there is no time element (you can take as long as you want between shots at Snoods) and multiple levels, the game is perfect for folks with significant physical disabilities.

Wireless Communication and Public School Disconnects

2007-09-12T08:34:00.000-04:00

I was listening to National Public Radio talking this morning about how increasingly employees are working from home with advances in the internet, but that in the process they are becoming lonely. Rather than go into work, they host other stay-home internet-using workers in their apartments to work for a day called Jelly. Apparently this is a growing phenomenon in New York, Washington, Chicago, and other big cities.

Meanwhile, two different students from a recent master's class on tech-supported literacy report that their principals will not allow any students to have email accounts. Who knows what havoc they might wreak or what horrors might befall them if they had access to a technology that billions of people across the world have been using for much more than a decade. I think there has always been a disconnect between school and real life learning (remember Mark Twain, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."), but I think it's a chasm at present heading toward a cataclysm. While NCLB pushes schools, teachers, and children toward more and more multiple-choice expertise in minutiae and spends billions for testing, most schools I've visited cannot figure out how to budget for more than a single computer in most classrooms.

In the real world, however, choices seems much more complex than multiple choice and we are more and more virtually connected. Yesterday morning, e.g., a doc student and I sat in a coffee shop, sipping a latte and a macchiato. With wireless internet and our two laptops, we held an instant messaging planning session with a colleague in Germany. We designed a research project, explored some free internet resources to support it, set some deadlines, and did it all in greater comfort and without the interruptions of the workplace.