Using Storybird.com in the classroom

Do you remember that scene in Forest Gump where Lieutenant Dan appears on the dock as Gump sails his shrimping boat through the bay? Forest is so overcome by the excitement of seeing his old war buddy that he jumps overboard to swim to shore, leaving his boat to become a temporary analog of the famous Flying Dutchman ghost ship.

That’s usually how I react to new bits of technology. I don’t look back or anticipate potential problems – I blindly jump in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I haven’t decided if using Storybird with my students is going to be a success, or one of my ideas that are prone to devastating failure. Storybird is a free service where users can create (collaboratively, if desired) their own stories using a collection of illustrations provided by the site.

Here’s my idea: We are finishing up a reading of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. The big question that keeps resurfacing throughout the unit is Is is better not to know? The kids seem to understand its meaning in the context of Charlie Gordon, but they’re having a hard time connecting it to their own lives.

I got to thinking – wouldn’t it be cool if they had to write a story that focused on that same essential question? Beginning next week students will begin working on writing a brief tale – a children’s story, perhaps – that centers around a character discovering something he/she perhaps would have been better off not knowing.

The project will get a bit trickier when they realize that Storybird does not allow a user to upload their own images. Students will have to choose a set of illustrations and fashion their story around the images available.

Having two variables – a required theme and a specific set of illustrations – may be too much for them. But I’ve already jumped off the dock with this one, so all there’s left to do is see who sinks and who swims.

Below is a sample story Songbird created to explain their vision as well as the handout I’m planning on using with students to explain how to use the site.


About us: a peek inside Storybird on Storybird


How to Use Storybird.com

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iPod Touch Home Screen OCD

iTHSOCD - The uncontrollable desire to control both the functionality and the aesthetic properties of the home screen on the iPod Touch.

I am simultaneously coining a new disorder and self-diagnosing myself with it. This brand new disorder is called iPod Touch Home Screen Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (iTHSOCD).

It has been driving me nuts that default apps on the iPod Touch can't be removed. I don't own stocks – I don't need an app staring at me from the home screen to remind me of that fact. There's also an app called Voice Memos for recording reminders and messages, and my iPod (3rd generation touch) doesn't even have a microphone! I don't need this junk!

It seems that that only options to remedy this are to either jailbreak the iPod and risk getting infected by the latest rash of viruses, or to simply drag all the unwanted items onto their own home screen. I decided to play it safe and go for the latter. The apps aren't gone, but they're effectively segregated.

On to my next problem.

Safari comes with the handy option of saving favorites directly onto the home screen. I personally like this because all my frequently visited sites can be grouped on their own home screen as a visually pleasing favorites list. The only problem is that not all of these sites provide visually pleasing home screen icons.


As best as I can tell, Safari uses the default .ico file (that's the little picture that appears in the address bar of a browser) as the home screen icon for sites that are configured for mobile browsers (Bank of America, for example). For all other sites, it just takes a screen shot and uses that. These screen shots are tiny, bland, and basically useless for anything other than making my iPod look kind of unkempt. Here's where the Home Screen OCD kicked in – I figured out a way to give every site an appealing home screen icon.

It's simple but it works. The screen shot Safari uses is literally a shot of whatever is on the screen at the time the “add to home screen” button is pressed. Before pressing the button, all I do is zoom in on either a logo or interesting design element, and viola! Instant home screen icon. This works especially well for blogs or other personal websites.

Home Screen OCD satisfied.

Here is my iPod favorites list, complete with visually pleasing icons.


And if you're interested, here are the links starting at the top left:

School Email – District employee email site
My Blog – You're lookin' at it!
Merit Badge – My band's Myspace page. Not really active these days, but I like to check up on it occasionally
Cool Cat Teacher – Excellent blog by educator, Vicki Davis
2 Cents Worth – Another great education blog
BobUffalo.com – Colleague's fledgling website promoting her children's book series
M&T Bank – Amazingly, this site did not supply its own icon
The Edublogger – Blog sponsored by edublogs.org
TeachPaperless – Great ideas from progressive-thinking Latin teacher, Shelly Blake-Plock
Mike Fisher – PB Works site for my tech integrator pal
Ed Insanity - Blog site of educator, Jonathan Becker

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Using the iPod Touch to Word Process

A glimpse of Zoho on the iPod Touch

Maybe it was too much birthday cake, but last night I had a bit of a stomach ache. I called it an early night and climbed into bed to play with my new iPod Touch.

Years ago I had experimented with students writing on a Pocket PC using Pocket Word. I was hoping to find an app for my ipod that was along the lines of a pocket version of OpenOffice but as far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Instead I turned to Zoho.com - the leading rival to Google Docs. As far as I'm concerned, the two are equal. The only reason I favor Zoho is because up until recently Google Docs was blocked for us at school.

Toying around with my iPod last night eventually turned into a blog post about the dangers of poor administrative decisions. It was a decent post, but I was more proud of the fact it was written in such an unconventional manner.

I'm proud that this post is being written the same way. Here's my quick how-to for turning the iPod Touch into a portable word processor.

Go to mobile.zoho.com. Saving a shortcut to the home screen creates a very app-like icon. Unfortunately, Google gears hasn't quite found it's way to the iPod yet, so cloud sites only work with a wireless connection. Otherwise, it functions very much as a suitable word processing app.

Notice the Zoho icon at the lower left of my home screen.

Pros

• The iPod Touch keypad allows for surprisingly speedy typing (especially when turned horizontally).

• Because Zoho is a cloud app, work started on the iPod can later be completed or edited on a laptop or desktop computer.

Cons

• Mobile Zoho is missing many of the bells and whistles that the full-scale app boasts. The one most sorely missed is probably spell check. As a Firefox user, I've grown used to a built in spell check when I type anything.

• Mobile Zoho does not support direct export to other sites. This means after I'm finished typing this post, I'll have to copy and paste it into the Blogger editor before publishing.

• Creating a new document is not a problem. Neither is adding text or saving it. There's one major glitch with using Zoho on the iPod Touch. For some reason, after the document is saved and closed, it is no longer able to be edited again on the iPod. It can still be opened and viewed, but clicking on the text field does not bring up the key lard and cursor. I sent a support request to the nice folks at Zoho - if I hear back, I'll update this post.

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The Cycle of Failure for Administrative Decision Making

Having a good relationship between administration and faculty is paramount for a positive work environment. When that bond crumbles, everything else is soon to follow. No one likes being told what to do and it's even worse when the person handing down the commands is out of favor. Here's the series of events that leads to total collapse:

1. The administrator sends down a directive. Either because of poor rapport with the faculty or nearsighted decision-making, he/she does not ask for input before doing so.

2. Naturally, the faculty is furious. They vow to either ignore the directive completely and rely on safety in numbers to avoid consequence or they pursue the directive in such a lax manner that there is no way its goal will ever be achieved.

3. The directive is a spectacular failure.

4. Frustrated and looking to make things right, the administrator sends out another directive. Again, the faculty throws up its arms in resentment. This time, however, they cite the failure of the previous directive as the reason to not do as they're told. "His/her previous plan didn't work, so why should we believe this one will?"

The administrator's efforts will always fail because of the faculty's ill contempt. It's a vicious circle that is nearly impossible to recover from without some major personnel changes.

When this cycle of administrative failure happens, what's to blame - the poor attitude of the faculty or the myopic approach taken by the administrator? Probably a bit of both. I understand that me offering advice to administrators is like the flight attendant telling the pilot what to do in the cockpit, but sometimes a different perspective helps. Before handing down orders, do yourself and every else involved the courtesy of gathering as much input as you can before making a decision that affects everyone in your building.

While most posts on my blog are reactive/reflective of something happening in my professional life, this one is not. At least not recently. Several teachers on my team at school currently have student teachers, and I thought about this today while discussing with them what they should hope for as they begin the interview process for a permanent teaching position. In my opinion, working in a positive environment far outweighs all other aspects of a district. It's the job of both the administration and the faculty to make this happen.

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What's Next for Digital Natives?

At only about 4 years of age, I can remember sitting in front of the bulky console television playing my parents' Atari game system. I knew how to change cartridges and turn the thing on. Some games, I even knew how to play (All I could get my triangular spaceship in Asteroids to do was spin recklessly in the center of the screen, but I was a champ at Chopper Command). I don't think my folks ever sat down with me and taught me how to play - I just knew.

Chopper Command - Still the coolest Atari game ever

Almost 25 years later, I am now experiencing this from the other side of the fence. My 2-year-old daughter Sophie smuggled my new iPod Touch from the counter last night. Curious to what she would do, I opened up Doodle Buddy, a free drawing app I had downloaded earlier in the evening. It's simple to use – draw with your fingers and shake to clear the screen. Within minutes, Sophie had is all figured out. I didn't really have to teach her – she just knew.

Although Marc Prensky first coined the term digital native in 2001, I associate it with the work (and recent webinar I attended) of author Don Tapscott. The term is used to broadly define the current youth generation:

A digital native is a person for whom digital technologies already existed when they were born, and hence has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3s.

Sophie certainly fits the definition of a digital native, but I think it's fair to say she doesn't belong to the same population that Tapscott and Prensky were writing about. Sophie's generation has yet to be defined. What will it be – digital native 2.0? The Networked Generation? The Wifi Child?

Regardless of the name, this generation undoubtedly has a lot to look forward to.

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Review of OpenOffice for Kids - OOo4Kids

There has been some buzz lately about a student-specific productivity suite called OpenOffice for Kids (or OOo4Kids) and considering my recent blog post pushing for the use of OpenOffice in schools, I felt the need to give it a good looking over.

Just like OpenOffice, the OOo4Kids word processing software is called Writer, and is completely compatible with Microsoft Word. It can save files with many different extensions including .doc, .rtf, and OpenOffice's native .odt. Because it's based on OpenOffice 3.0, there's no added features exclusive only to Ooo4Kids, so pretty much all the pros I listed in my early blog post apply to OOo4Kids as well.



The biggest advantage is an optimized layout directed at the tasks most often performed by children. Take a look at the side-by-side comparison of the default toolbars in OpenOffice and OOo4Kids. It's streamlined with only the most common icons active. I'm curious how it was decided what would make the cut because several tools that I find rather important (italics, bold, and underlined, for example) are missing.

Tools can still be added to the toolbar by manually activating them, but I don't think this is the kind of configuration the targeted audience is easily capable of performing. For example, to add a table in OpenOffice, go to Insert in the top menu and select table. This is missing in Ooo4Kids. Instead, here are the instructions from the help tutorial on creating a table:

To set the Behavior of rows/columns options for tables in text documents, choose Tools - Options - OOo4Kids Writer - Table, or use the Fixed, Fixed/Proportional, and Variable icons on the Table Bar.

I'm on the fence about the need for a student-specific version because I never really found OpenOffice that difficult to use in the first place. I don't teach at the elementary level, however, and that's where OOo4Kids is really intended. If the goal of the project was to create a simpler, more streamlined version of OpenOffice, then they succeeded. The problem, however is that the usefulness of tools is subjective.

Like all things open source, OpenOffice for Kids can be configured to your liking, and will surely improve as a community of users grow around it. And hey - If it's another advantage to adopting OpenOffice over Microsoft Office (since there is no student-friendly flavor), then I'm all for OOo4Kids.

A screenshot of OOo4Kids in action

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Eat Dinner with Your Family!

When my wife and I first got married (it'll be four years in April!), my mom gave us one simple piece of advice – never eat dinner with the television on. She reminded us that dinner was a time to catch up with each other's lives; a time to ask How was your day? We've followed her advice, and I feel our lives are better for it.

Today (while not eating a meal), a commercial for Stouffer's caught my attention. They had taken my mom's words of wisdom one step further by suggesting that kids who eat dinner with their families are destined to do better in school, be more successful, and stay out of trouble. Wait a minute, Stouffer's, I think you're manipulating data here.

Am I arguing that eating dinner every night as a family is important? Absolutely not – I wholehearted agree that it's important to establish that as part of the daily routine. But I'm having a hard time swallowing the assumption that sitting down to a sodium-delicious Stouffer's meal will improve a kid's work habits at school. I remember a similar scenario appearing in an Educational Psychology course I had to take in grad school. It went like this - If wealthy families tend to own small dogs, then can it be assumed that small dogs are an indicator of wealth? I don't remember the exact term – some form of causation or correlation – but the same applies to families who eat dinner together. It's not the meal that causes the kids to do well, but the fact they come from a family who has it together enough to know that it's important to share in the lives of the people you love.

I'd like to know the percentage of families who still eat together. I'd assume it's lower than we expect. But in the end, if it takes a commercial campaign to make it happen, I'm okay with that. It's not quite as sentimental as your mother sharing her advice on your wedding day, but the message is clear. It's important to eat as a family, share as a family, and listen as a family.

Here's the commercial, or you can visit the commercial campaign site (dubbed "Let's Fix Dinner") here.

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