A friend of mine who now works for Picnik (or should I say Google seeing that Picnik was recently purchased by them), the online photo editing website passed along these little suggestions this week.

New for Back to School We just launched some handy tools that make it easy to create photo-personalized blog headers, newsletters, desk name tags, and class photo frames. Its as easy as dragging photos into our back to school templates. Really, its that easy–and these back to school templates are free. Learn more.

Get and share ideas about Picnik in class Thanks to suggestions from teachers around the world, we’ve also put together a list of suggested Picnik activities to use with your students. Were always looking for more innovative ways to use the product in school, so if you have any ideas, please share them in the educator section of our Feedback Forum. If you haven’t used Picnik before you are in for a treat. Straight forward simple, and loads of options. Create a class account and have your kids editing pictures like a pro in no time flat!

Last year one of the best ads released during the SuperBowl was this simple ad by Google

Shortly after the release of this video Google asked you to make your own search stories.

Simply go to http://www.youtube.com/searchstories and start creating your story.

What a great way to teach students search skills.

Give students and start and end point. For example in 3rd Grade I might give students: Rocks and Volcanos. Start with Rocks and create a search story that gets you to end your search story with how Rocks and Volcanos are related.

Or in High School how about finding a connection between two random books: The Odyssey and 1984.

I’m sure you can come up with your own examples. Take two unrelated topics and see if students can use their search skills to bring them together. Or could a student tell the story of a character through search. Take just the character Homer in The Odyessey and tell his story in 7 lines using search.

Or you can do what I did and tell the story of you.

So many possibilites!

  During my fifteen years of teaching, I often used food analogies in my teaching. Eating is something we all understand and hopefully enjoy. Locating and eating the ‘right foods’ is something we can all aspire. While searching for some new recipes this summer, I spent time at two sites: Epicurious and Eattheseasons. Used together, you can find the best foods to buy all year long (the latter indicates non-veggies as well)

Epicurious has an American (only) map of the states. One selects the month, then move your mouse pointer over any state to get a list of 4-12 fruits and vegetables in season. Personally, I buy whatever the local grocer has at discount. I figure it’s in surplus, most likely fresh and in season. But, Epicurious can be a helpful extension. It could indicate some additional foods that you grocer is not promoting, help in planning some key event in the upcoming weeks or something to anticipate in a traveling excursion. As I write this, I’m thinking back to the amazing dates of the Middle East and mangoes of the Phillipines that I have sampled. Yes, I’m a food addict.

Epicurious offers many recipes for each food in season, but the many have real life gastro-testing reviewers who have added comments these recipes truly make it a treasure in refining your cooking experience. Wine selections are also offered for some recipes. So, being from Ontario, Canada (I used New York State) – found cabbage and wondered what I could do besides Cabbage Rolls. So I found Pork Chops with Red Cabbage and the readers mentioned it was a favorite and adding vegetable/chicken stock helped. Sweet.

I remember reading about the merits of eating foods that are in season in one’s region. EatTheSeasons has a great article worth reading. Here is a portion:

WHY eat the seasons?

There are a number of good reasons to eat more local, seasonal food:

• to reduce the energy (and associated CO2 emissions) needed to grow and transport the food we eat

• to avoid paying a premium for food that is scarcer or has travelled a long way

• to support the local economy

• to reconnect with nature’s cycles and the passing of time

but, most importantly, because

• seasonal food is fresher and so tends to be tastier and more nutritious

Since, I am Canadian. I do appreciate that EatTheSeasons includes the UK and Canada. Moreover, for the holistic cook, it includes which fish, farm animal, game, and even nuts & spices are ‘at their best’ and ‘in season’. For those in America, Epicurious would be superior place to begin. Bon appetit.

Technorati Tags: food, recipes, Epicurious, game, fish, taste

The two best sessions for me at Edubloggercon today at ISTE2010 ended up talking about Networks and teaching how to use networks with students. For lack of a better term we called it “Networked Literacy”

I first started thinking about this back in August after reading Writing in the 21st Century by Kathleen Yancey (worth your time).

Based on that reading I created this diagram that looks at today’s literacy development.

The pyramid represents the amount of time we spend teaching different types of literacy. Print Literacy is still the bases of our teaching in schools. Some of us and some schools are starting to bring digital literacy into the equation, but few of us are touching on or teaching Networked Literacy. In August as I started to think about this idea of Networked Literacy I came up with this working definition:

Networked literacy is what the web is about. It’s about understanding how people and communication networks work. It’s the understanding of how to find information and how to be found. It’s about how to read hyperlinked text articles, and understand the connections that are made when you become “friends” or “follow” someone on a network. It’s the understanding of how to stay safe and how to use the networked knowledge that is the World Wide Web. Networked Literacy is about understanding connections.

After today’s conversation I think it’s pretty close to what we were all thinking. It’s the idea of teaching students that they have networks in Facebook and through other web connections. We need to teach them how to use those networks to spread their message. Today many of us ed tech people do the networking for students via our twitter accounts, our own blogs, and the whole of our PLNs. Students today have networks, the issue is most of them are blocked in schools. We do not think of them as idea spreading networks but instead as social-networks that students must be kept from during school hours.

Learning networks are Social networks.

There is not one of us here at ISTE that does not use Twitter strictly for learning. We share our days, our lives. We share jokes, stay in touch and communicate on things that are personal to us. If we are allowed to use our learning-networks for social connections why can’t students use their social-networks for learning connections?

Of course Facebook is just a popular example. There are many other networks that we should be teaching students to use, networks to help them spread their message.

There’s another part of Networked Literacy that we touched on today. The idea of using social-connections to curate information. It’s asking your Twitter network for resources instead of Google, or asking your Facebook friends dinner ideas rather than looking up a restaurant yourself. Learning when to ask these networks for help and why you would you them rather than Google is a type of Networked Literacy we need to be teaching.

The conversations we had today are just the beginning. I’m looking forward to discussion this idea in the Blogger’s Cafe in the coming days as I think we’re starting to define a new powerful literacy that I hope we will be able to teach our students how to use.

ISTE 2010 Conference here in Denver is starting off on a positive note for me. Today was the EduBloggerCon, and as usual we had some great discussions around the future of tools and learning.

I facilitated one of the first sessions of the day titled “Are Wikis Dying?” It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with every since Dennis Harter made me think about it earlier this year in a meeting.

What really made this session fantastic was not only the conversation around what a wiki is, where is its niche, but the fact that the creator of wikispaces one of the most popular wikis in education joined us.

So are wikis dying?

I’m not sure they are dying as much as their niche is becoming more defined. Before Google Wave, Google Docs, and other real time collaborative tools we tried to use wikis (usually without success) to be real time content builders. Now that we have a tool that fills that gap wikis don’t need to….or does it?

We discussed the place of a wiki and how some schools are just starting to embrace wikis and are hoping they are not dying anytime soon. They are an easy “beginner” tool to get teachers and other Web 2.0 Newbies into the tech world.

After the session my thoughts are changing a bit. I’m not sure wikis are dying the slow death I thought they were earlier. There is a place for them. Much like a tool belt, they are just another tool. What I think is happening is, they are becoming a very specific tool for a specific purpose. We need to continue to define what a wiki is. Is uploading some word documents to a wiki page actually a wiki?

I believe a wiki is and always has been about mass collaboration around content. A wiki with four attachments is just a web page with links. A wiki is about allowing people to collaborate and create content around a specific purpose or idea.

As other tools continue to mature it will be interesting to see how they merge or if they merge. Will Google Docs look more like a wiki in the future? Or will wikis start to look more like Google Docs? Only time will tell and it’s exciting to think where these tools will take us into the future.

What are your thoughts….are wikis dying?

Thank you for helping to support the launch of my first book Reach.

Here are the final numbers of the downloads in case you were wondering.

This Blog: 2,151

U Tech Tips Blog: 77

Twitter: 403

LinkedIn: 1

Facebook: 37

Completely blew away any expectations I had on giving away the book. I appreciate your support, your comments, and your help in getting the word out about Reach.

As educators, we blog about best practices in using technology and information for learning. We discuss the the lives of our students outside of school in the ways they are connected and seemingly always “On” when it comes to their social networks. The New York Times just published an article entitled “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying the Mental Price” that looks at some of the negative effects of our always being connected. The author, Matt Richtel, combines research and a running narrative of one family’s gadget filled lifestyle.

One focus of my work in the upcoming school year will be to work with students, staff and parents to discuss how how to use technology to support their values and the reaching of their goals. We will look at what actions are needed to optimize the use of technology and information gathering. We will also look at what steps that need to be taken to lessen the influence of technology so that goals for family time, good communication, community involvement, etc. can be met. I also hope to discuss the idea of running a “screen free week” just as Jeff has in his schools.

I will be working with elementary and middle schools students in my school to develop their information, technology, and media literacies. One of the big habits of mind that goes with all these skills is to be able to focus with depth to really gain understanding. Helping students to think about how they are using technology and information in an effective and efficient matter has to be a primary goal for any technology and information integration program.

Image Source

Paint the World With Light is the first digital media challenge from The Student Creative, a book of student light paintings from around the world. The goal of this project was to have students use long exposure photography to show the unique character of their own communities.

When you purchase a copy of the book, you paint the world with a little more light; all of our profits go towards the Jacaranda Foundation, a school for AIDS orphans in Malawi. For more information on this and future projects, visit the Student Creative Website.

For more information on the Jacaranda School, please visit the Jacaranda Foundation’s Website.

As a sad postscript, I would like to add that this book is dedicated to the memory of my mentor at Teachers College who passed away last week. Renee Darvin was a fierce advocate for Art Education, whose passion for the arts affected thousands upon thousands of students through her work as a teacher, a professor, an administrator, and Director of Art Education for the city of New York.

We’ll miss you greatly Renee, thank you for everything.

Take 14 minutes out of your day today or tomorrow and watch this video:

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Is it sad that this excites me?

I love Tim Berners-Lee’s last statement:

“If we end up building all the things I can imagine, we’ve failed.”

This coming from the “father of the World Wide Web”.

The video really talks about now that we have all this information on the web how do we organize it and make it work for us?

In the past week I’ve radically shifted the way I use Twitter, that more closely aligns with this new semantic web approach. It’s been an eye opening experience for me and once again I’m excited about the possibilities that are twitter.

It’s very much about connections, and Twitter is a connection between people. I follow people who I believe will lead me to good content. But how do you know what that good content is in a stream that is over 3,000 people? That is where using semantic web tools such as Twittertim.es comes in. If you haven’t yet given this site a go….I strongly recommend it.

We’ve said for a while now that the “cream raises to the top” and now with a semantic tools like Twittertim.es we have that.

Basically what Twittertim.es does is make since of your twitter stream by collecting all the links that are being shared by those that you follow and gives weight to them based on the amount of times a link appears. Those links with the most tweets and retweets create your Twittertim.es style newspaper.

I no longer follow a stream of people, I use the people to lead me to the best content out there. Today I opened my twittertim.es page and the top 10 stories were all interesting to me. There isn’t another newspaper out there that could do that. This is completely tailored to my specifications based on the people I follow and the news they are reading and retweeting.

Using this same idea, over the weekend I completely redid the decks in Tweetdeck on my computer. I deleted all the lists of people I was following and recreated decks around content. I’m now mining Twitter for the content that is relevant to me. At first I thought that I’d miss my lists of people, but honestly I’m checking Twitter even more, I’ve added one list back, that of the people at my school to help encourage them to continue to use Twitter. I retweet things they post, and respond to them. Now here’s what my Tweetdeck looks like:

Mentions
Direction Messages
#Mariners
#Redshirts
isbangkok list
#barcampbangkok
New Followers

Because I follow mostly educators and Web 2.0 people in Twittertim.es I no longer need those lists in twitter. I let Twittertim.es find the most relevant information from all the people I follow and deliver it to me in an ever changing, up to date way that I could never keep up with.

Because Tweetdeck allows me to add a “New Followers” deck I can easily follow new educators that are following me, just adding to my network and making my results in Twittertim.es that much more relevant.

Tweetdeck has now become a place of content, not a place of people. The lastest news about the Mariners, or the Redshirt protesters in downtown Bangkok. I’m mining Twitter for the content that I want. I add and delete hashtags with what I’m interested in that day. As WordPress 3.0 is coming out soon, I’ll be adding the #wordpress to the deck and when the protest is finally over in downtown Bangkok I’ll delete that deck.

The content is constantly changing depending on my needs. Part of my responsibility then is to share what I find interesting back into the content stream and allow it to be tossed around by the community. It people believe my resource is valuable they retweet it. Just how much content is out there? Only four things I’ve ever shared have shown up in my twittertim.es. Two of my own blog posts (which was an honor) and two things that I shared. Everything else was content I did not know about or was not aware of.

Just another way to find the content you want among a stream of chaotic information.