Lunar eclipse

I taught a little about the lunar eclipse this week and was able to download and use this excellent video:

http://www.vimeo.com/716247

It portrays the dynamics of a lunar eclipse with extra-ordinary graphics.

Mailing lists

Something i havent paid much attention to the last few years is mailing lists, the old way of staying connected thru the Internet. Many people stopped using these because they come thru email and most people get too much email. The great thing about them tho is that they come straight to your mail box, a place that most people visit everyday. You dont have to go to a separate website or open an RSS utility, a less frequent activity. Using modern email filters (sometimes called 'rules') and separate mail boxes, you can segregate the emails for a later more convenient time to read.

I was reminded of this because i subscribed to Yahoo's MPS Parent Forum list. This has become a very active and pretty raucous list, tho not in a mean or offensive way. Discussions are critical and candid. Many MPS district people, including teachers, find this kind of 'difficult to control thing' forbidding. A couple of years ago i tried to get a list for ESL teachers started but people in charge of things like this didnt want to allow it because it is difficult to control what issues will arise and what people say about them. It is true that subscribers have to accept and frequently be reminded of several ground rules that keep a list civil, on-topic, positive and productive. But there is a great deal of value in open-ended discussions because it surfaces what is really on people's minds and addresses those issues frankly. Mailing lists can make an incredible amount of relevant information and expertise available and can facilitate networking in a very effective way.

The MPS Parent Forum messages have long threads about about vital issues that affect the viability of the MPS school district functioning and it's ability to compete with private and charter schools. These are issues that many district officials, schools and teachers willingly ignore. And in a large diverse district like MPS there is a lot going on at the grassroots level that is difficult to stay apprised of in any other way.

Login difficulties

I have not logged-in in a while and have changed laptops. My old one disintegrated. I spent hours trying to login, going in Google circles. The ticket turned out to be to go to preferences and clear the cookies. Apparently, when you "sign out" on Google, the cookies are not deleted.

It is the paranoid side of my personality, but i find this to be ominous. Google always knows who you are, where you have been, and what you have been up to. Life in the future will be totally transparent, as will our souls.

Image sites Thing #28

I did some research on image sites this week. I found a comparison table, captured and edited it to find the best site to store images for my purposes. I dont know exactly what my purposes are but i would like to store family and neighborhood photos of which i have many megabits. So i looked for sites that were not limited in storage volume and sites that would allow high-resolution downloads. The capacity to link would be an added bonus if i ever need it for authored web pages but turned out not to be so easy to find.

For my purposes, Flickr did not rate well enough even to rank. It is very limited in many ways. Dot Photo, Fujifim and Webshots from CNET were all competitive. All have subscription costs, Fuji the lowest.

The best for me is Picasa from Google. They have an upload manager that handles all most any file type you can imagine, unlimited storage and are totally free.

If anyone wants the comparison table i could email it to you. I cant find a way to upload downloadable files to this blog site so if anyone wants it let me know.

Citation Machine Thing #31

The bibliography of the students in their 1st Language Poetry projects were unexpectedly poor, given the number of times it was taught by both Bob and i. So i gave two small follow up assignments to insure student mastery of Citation Machine.

Citation Machine is an excellent web resource. I handed every student a book, demonstrated using the site again, then required them to do a one book bibliography with it. Students were able to copy and paste the bibliographic information into a Word file and unless it was perfect i could reject it.

To follow up, students were required to hand in their project bibliographies on paper. I modeled collecting website information again on the Canterbury Tales and then turned them loose to create their own. This is much more difficult because of the lack of standardization of websites, even ostensibly authoritative sites are difficult for students to manage. But most students were pretty well. When helping students, even i am confused by the terms "Title of the Web Page" and "Title of the Web Site". Sometimes the web page name only appears to be the window name, but i know this to be distinguished in html. And frequently i only used the base server address for the the Web Site title tho i doubt this is what Mr. Turab had in mind.

All this should be settled when we get a president for the Internet.

ebooks Thing #22

WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot*, *sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such licour,
Of which virtue engender'd is the flower;
When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath
Inspired hath in every holt* and heath *grove, forest
The tender croppes* and the younge sun *twigs, boughs

I looked at NetLibrary. It appears to be a subscription service. Could not get far with it.

I tried doing research on Canterbury tales using ebooks. I was not impressed with this. Who would want to read a book on a laptop screen when one could curl up in front of a fire with a dusty copy checked out from the library and a pipe and small glass. But to each his own. I found several open source readers that can be downloaded for almost any operating system. Versiontracker has a slew. Most were free and some open source but none came with tobacco or whiskey.

Unitedstreaming - Thing #9

Used Unitedstreaming to teach about globes and latitude and longitude this past week. I could not find an age appropriate video that was understandable and had the target content. My 8-20 yr old students had to forgo a 4th grader talking down to them. But it made some abstract concepts quite comprehendible, including the concept of hemisphere.

The funniest thing about the video was this 5 year-old always in front of the discussion group. It must have been the director's child. She had such a blank look on her face.

Audio books Thing #20

I was disappointed in this. The links if found lead to a lot of public domain books in text, like the Guttenburg Project, but unless you use a text reader, like Zardvox who sounds like he came from the planet, Zarkon found in 50's science fiction movies.

I was expess interested in listening to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer because i taught the prologue and found a really good translations. I was hoping to listen to it during commuting. I usually could not tell which were translated and which were in Middle English. If anyone can suggest good sites, i would appreciate it.

How to convert flash .flv files to Mpeg .mp4 format - Thing #21

This falls into one of those technical domains that nobody else reading this blog will be interested in. But i am posting it because the article title will show up in Google and someone else having the same technical question may benefit.

One of our bilingual people wanted to show a YouTube video about Somali culture at our recent parent meeting. YouTube is blocked by the district firewall to reduce traffic volume, which is a frequent problem because there are so many valuable videos on the site. It is possible to go around the firewall with the MPS Roadrunner connection but who knows where that is at, certainly not in the classroom needed.

Most YouTube videos are Adobe Flash Video .flv files, a proprietary format that requires a license to do much with. As a general rule VLC, a freeware media player, will play Anything. And it is supposed to play Flash video files but would only pickup the mp3 soundtrack, no video. I learned from Todd Pierson at a district meeting that there was at least one shareware capture utility for YouTube. I downloaded it a couple of others and compared their ability to convert. YouTube Video Grabber is also a shareware capture utility but like VLC would not convert the video, only sound. Visual Hub, an excellent shareware conversion utility, same story, no video. I expected that i could drop the file on any updated Flash enabled browser, like Safari or Firefox but they acted totally ignorant. I think Adobe tries to keep changing proprietary formats to make them dysfunctional with older software as a sales strategy.

TubeSock was simple and efficient to save the file in .mp4 format, as well as several other formats. Mp4, i think, is a highly compressed format favored by video media players, like video ipods. Not great but serviceable. Our bilingual AE put the video on a big screen and let it play while the Somali families ate.

All of this software is findable at Versiontracker.com, the premeire site to find any software to do anything, if you know the right search terms. I should add that this is all Macintosh software and i am not aware of what is available for Windows.

ELM for research Thing #13

I was sick today, so i actually got some Internet type work.

My daughter is working a major college paper on the Iraqi government so it seemed propitious to explore ELM. I looked at ELM during the workshops but could not find a venue that i thot would work well for ESL students. Altho i havent tried it yet for the higher English proficiency 1st language poetry research project.

It work quite well to turn up hundreds of publications of varying degrees of academic levels. The advanced search interface is quite good. The problem i had often was that i could not see any obvious ways to actually read many of the articles. If there was a PDF download of the article that was obvious and easy. But often i could read the abstract and then see not even tell if the article had to be purchased, was off-site and could be read, or was available on-site but i was too stupid to see the button to click to read it.

I think it will take me a while to get to know it.

Culturgrams - States Edition

Culturgrams - States Edition was a pretty big disappointment. I should have evaluated it more closely before i took a class in to the lab to use it. It has no pictures, no slide show, and very little sound. The readability, in terms of grammar level for ESL, is unnecessarily high: Virginia became a state in... Kentucky obtained statehood... Statehood was given to Ohio... California entered the union... This made the simple question of what year did your state become a state a difficult obstacle

Probably not written by an educator who actually tried using it with students. Little educational software is. Bob suggested it was an after-thought add-on to the more successful world Culturgrams. It is especially disappointing because adding multi-media to it, and bringing the readability down or making it adjustable would be relatively cheap, given what is available for licensing on the Internet.

One fun thing about it was trying to get students to write down the sounds that their state bird makes. It drove them crazy.

Making a good site based on the same idea would be a great wiki project for high school students.

DTAC

Went to a DTAC meeting last week. District Technology Advisory Committee. It has always struggled to justify it's name, but it has a lot of very smart and innovative people on it.

We used Google Docs to generate the agenda and notes as the meeting proceded. That was cool.

For the most part, tho, i felt like a hillbilly visiting New York. There were demonstrations of several technologies that would be really great to have in the classroom. A nice portable bluetooth graphic sketch pad. Unfortunately my little school is struggling to meet copy machine costs and i kept thinking about that. I am not sure how many of the technologies are interesting bells & whistles and how much i could actually use more effectively than a class set of spiral notebooks. Most teachers are concerned with keeping students' attention and engagement. Wellstone is a little different that way. There is certainly no question of student engagement. But i'm not certain a cordless mouse will help teach L0 reading.

One thing for certain, i would almost kill for one of those smartboards. It would fit very neatly with a strategy i have used for years of generating a class written book from wordless or well known stories. Someday.

Netrekker Thing #12

Netrekker or however you spell it, turned out to be somewhat helpful this past week. I have been focusing on effectively teaching reading to L1 students using content area readings.

It is extraordinarily difficult to teach reading at this level, especially in the content areas of science and social studies, because there just isnt much out there for high school students that is not targeted for an interest level of first or second grade children.

In the L1 classes i am teaching map reading skills right now and i found that i could search nettrekker even in this relatively esoteric skill area and was able to find a couple of pages written at the 3rd grade level. I found that i could write them down and simplify the grammar faster than i could create readings from scratch, which is what i have done in the past.

Even so it took about an hour to rewrite one page. And i suppose it breaks enough copyright laws to put me in jail. And it doesnt really help the L0 students in the class who dont understand the concept of reading. But it still seems an improvement.