English Education Professor

Squidnotes.

• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Henry IV, part I
• Henry IV, part II
• Henry V
• Hamlet
• Julius Caesar
• King Lear
• Macbeth
• The Merchant of Venice
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Othello
• Richard III
• Romeo and Juliet
• Sonnets
• The Taming of the Shrew
• The Tempest
• Twelfth Night

“Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.” – (1998) Linda Darling Hammond

VoiceThreads might best be described as interactive media albums. They are essentially online slide shows of images, documents, or videos that enable viewers to comment on any slide (or at any point in the video) by typing, recording an audio or video comment, or drawing on the image itself. Teachers have been early adopters of the easy-to-learn technology, which has led the company to launch Ed.VoiceThread.com, a secure site just for educators and their students, says VoiceThreads cofounder Ben Papell. Link.

Newspaper: How the Chi-Town Daily News uses Highrise to manage their newsroom —Read the case study (more…)

Colette Cassinelli on April 18, 2008, on a Ning I’m following talked about “collecting examples of how educators are using Voicethread in their classroom or for professional development on a wiki at: http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/

I am batch loading all my docs using both these tools. Right now, DocSyncer works faster for batch uploads of my (mostly) MS Word and Powerpoint files.

Google Docs allows you to browse for a file on your computer and upload it to the service, one-by-one. Documents and presentations can be emailed in, but not spreadsheets. In January, Google released a Document List Uploader tool that provides drag-and-drop uploads to the service. Third party tools like DocSyncer can automatically upload your documents from your PC to Google Docs.

Only Ning, Andreessen declares, benefits from a “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator. Say someone sets up an Angelina Jolie net with 10 members, which grows as each person draws in others. Then an adoption site breaks off, a Jon Voight hate group rises up, and a Brad Pitt love club forms. Meanwhile, a Lara Croft nostalgia net launches, spawning a legion of soft-core cyberporn spin-offs. Soon you have 2, 3, 10 networks — all expanding simultaneously. Meanwhile, the original group is attracting even more users. Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries. Fastcompany.

I’m trying to make some decisions about upgrading my Wordpress to 2.5. Mozilla’s upgrades have been buggy for me, and has cost me blogging time.

As I figure out how to do this, I am reminded of all the front-end decisions I want to make about creating three new distance education courses this Summer Session I.

So, that’s what’s on my radar. I want to purchase all my software so that I can really rock and roll this summer and create some inspirational, user-friendly, pedagogically sound design.

I’m not asking for much.

I’m getting a MacBook Pro notebook with (free) iLife. So, I’ll be able to make web sites and courses on the fly. I’m resisting using a .mac account, even though the 1-click publishing sounds good.
I’m also trying to figure out how to create 1) the look (and creation-ease) of a mac-created web presence, 2) the interactivity of Ning, and 3) the ease of grading of Moodle.